The Passion of the Antichrist
by Invisible Stagehand
Summary: The Antichrist Damien Thorn is still alive in 2015, a new world of fabulous technologies. Now he must carry out Satan's plan: raise an army. Liberate Hell. Invade Heaven. Rated T for supernatural violence, disturbing material, blasphemy. Chapters 1 - 12 are here; I'm up to Chapter 64 on AO3 (see author profile).
1. Wake

The police were called when somebody noticed that the huddled figure under the blanket on the park bench had not moved for hours. When the officers arrived, surly from working on a holiday, they thought the man might be sleeping. But there was no movement of the too-thin chest under the blanket, and the long feet were bare, resting one on the other in a way that seemed oddly intimate.

One officer pulled back the blanket and looked wearily at a narrow white face, heavily bearded. The man's eyes were closed and unmoving, and when the officer touched the neck, he found the flesh stiff and cold.

"Dead as a doornail," he pronounced with blunt confidence. "Wonder who stole his shoes?"

"Oh no," said a despairing voice, and the officers turned to see a woman in a tracksuit, holding her hand to her lips. "Is that John?"

"You know this man?"

"Yes, he's a client of mine. I'm Sarah Duchamp, with New York Social Services." She fumbled in her fanny pack and extracted her ID for them. "This man is - was - John Smith."

"And nobody stole his shoes," she sighed, standing beside the bench as though she wanted to sit down and stroke the dead man's hair. "He probably just gave them away. John just didn't have any boundaries, never had: give him food and he'd look for someone to share it with, find a room to stay in and he'd invite in ten other homeless and get them all thrown out. He just gave and gave and gave." A sigh. "The world would be a better place if more people were like that."

The officers rolled their eyes a bit at that.

The coroner's van pulled up, and an orderly leisurely removed a stretcher – there was no hurry. John Smith wasn't going anywhere. "Officer Brown. Got some cookies in the meat wagon if you want some," he offered.

"Thanks, Mike. Merry Christmas."

"Yeah," said Mike, peeling the damp blanket loose from the park bench. "Merry fuckin' Christmas to all of us."

* * *

Damien woke, sweat starting from every pore of his body. Something was gone, and he flailed around mentally, trying to grasp what was missing. It was important. Terribly important.

He remembered being a boy, riding in a boat going very fast over the bright water. The pounding sun, the spray and smell in his face, the wind whipping at him, the thunder of the engines: that whole babbling confusion of sensation – that was an approximation of what was suddenly absent. It felt like the sun had gone out.

No.

It was not the sun.

It was the Son that was gone.

He caught his breath at the thought and then he laughed, loudly, hearing it echo around the room and not caring who might hear. He had told his followers to find the Christ-child and destroy it, and they had! The Nazarene was gone, and he, Damien Thorn, he still lived!

He scrubbed at his face with both hands and then stopped, tenderly feeling along his jawline. What – he had a beard. Not the bristle of a few days or weeks growth either; long enough to be silky under his fingers.

How long had he been lying here, waiting for the Nazarene to die, waiting for his full powers to return? He twitched at the sudden stabbing of memory, of icy cold on his face and a burning pain in his back.

His mind felt clotted like glue, and he was struggling to pull memories free. He sat up and ran his hand under his pajamas, and found a tiny dimple on his back, between two ribs. A scar. That was where – what?

What had happened to him?

He rubbed his eyes; they felt raw in his head. The headache was the same sort of sensation, but it was fading.

He rose and went to see who else was here, wincing a little at the stiffness of his knees. He was not in the embassy in England; he was back in America, in the old Thorn mansion. He went from his bedroom to the upper atrium, down the stairs and into the living room. The rooms were empty as he passed them, silent and cold. This was a house meant to have servants in attendance: where were the flowers, the footsteps, the smell of food and sound of music and voices…

The walls were wrong. There were paintings that should be here, and sculptures: symbols of his Father's power, flashes of greatness that could be possessed by marble and ink and paint. But they were gone now; the walls were mostly bare, save for a few photos of people.

Photos of Robert and Katherine Thorn, smiling: he passed by those unheeding. The world had called them his parents, but he knew better. Then he passed by a painting of an old man that moved.

He turned and looked; the painting was a mirror and the man was him.

He was old! Years, decades older than he remembered. His face lined and bearded, his body soft with lack of exercise, too thin around the shoulders and neck. His hair was gray; he ran his wrinkled fingers over his scalp and felt the familiar cicatrix there, but everything else had changed. Only his eyes were the same, burning blue in their strangely corroded frame of flesh. He was – how was he so old?

How long had he been asleep?

He went downstairs and found the kitchen. No servants were waiting for him. The sink was full of dirty dishes, the trash full of emptied packages of food. TV dinners, but not quite: there was no foil in them, and the box that resembled a television turned out to be a very peculiar-looking microwave upon inspection.

It felt like morning, and when he moved the curtain from the French doors by the kitchen he saw early sunlight slanting through the bare trees. He found oatmeal, milk and a saucepan, and made breakfast for himself. He could dimly remembering doing this many times before. Dozens of times, certainly, and maybe hundreds. Maybe more. When had he come here? When had this happened, what – what had happened to him?

This wasn't the breakfast he should be eating. He should be seated at a table with his employees, eating bacon and eggs and rattling off orders. He should be in Japan, meeting with officials and businessmen; he should be in Russia and Australia and England. He should have conference calls scheduled for the next three hours. He should be a Power in the world, ordering and moving and planning, shaping the future to the path that was readied by prophecy.

He rose and hurled the empty bowl to the floor, shattering it. His fists clenched as he imagined shattering everything, every mirror, every window, the face and bones of every person he saw. But he stopped and controlled himself, let his anger run through him and away. This was not the time to rage. This was the time to learn.

There was a tiny calendar pinned to the wall. It said that it was December 2015. 2015? That couldn't be right. How could it be so long, so late, so much time gone? But either the calendar was a fake or his life had been pulled out from under him. He checked back through past months: it looked realistic enough. There were handwritten notes about buying extra oatmeal, and about someone going on vacation this week.

Before he could decide if it was true or not, he needed to remember where he had started from. What had happened that had led him here.

He sat and thought about himself.

I am Damien Thorn, he remembered. I am thirty-two – no, sixty-five years old now. Before I woke up here, I was … I was …

His teeth were suddenly bared in a snarl that was all skull.

He remembered the ruined church, where he had gone to slay the Nazarene with his own hands. The boy, beautiful Peter, throwing himself on the assassin's dagger to save Damien. And Peter's mother, that bitch, taking up the dagger and stabbing him, and then … lying on his side, feeling his lungs filling up with blood …

He pressed his hand to his chest, looked down and saw gray hairs curling around his fingers. But his heart still beat, he was still alive.

He remembered helicopters. An ambulance, a hospital. White sheets enveloping him, and tubes crawling all over his body like snakes. They tried to save his life, and they did. He lived. In a way.

The Nazarene was alive and his presence was a light eternally shining in his eyes, a thunder dimming his ears, blows eternally pummeling his flesh. He had to fight it. He had to stop it. But he had no strength, he couldn't think or plan with that rumble and glare constantly pounding at him. It was like drowning in light, but the light never ended: it just kept burning and burning...

He was here, at home, and there were men in attendance that he knew. They went away. He stayed, and ate and bathed and slept, and did little more.

Brain damage, they might have whispered. Mental illness, perhaps. But no one had been able to wake him from his fugue state.

He had stayed in this house, trying to escape the endless pressure of the Nazarene and failing. His powers waning with every day the God-creature lived. Numbly following the patterns of staying alive, while most of his mind fought to save itself.

He looked at the tiled floor and realized that he could see where the glaze was worn by his footsteps, in a straight line from the doorway, to the refrigerator and the microwave, to where he sat, and then back out. But there was fresh milk in the refrigerator, fresh bread on the counter. Who –

Pepita, his mind answered him after some prodding. Short, brown, quiet: she came to clean the house and bring in groceries. She must have written her vacation time on the calendar, and the notes as well. She was just a normal servant, though. There was no spark of love or adoration in her eyes when she asked him to move from where he sat, in a chair or on the bed or on the stairs, staring emptily into space. He moved and she cleaned, or she cleaned around him, politely, and then went away.

He had missed real attention. While he had been boiling in the Nazarene's accursed presence, a tiny part of him had mourned the empty rooms around him, the lack of contact. The lack of true servants. Followers. Worshippers.

He deserved to be worshiped. He rose to his feet and growled deep in his throat. He would find them, he would reveal himself to them, and they would return. He would order and they would obey; they would do his bidding, which was the bidding of his Father.

Damien Thorn, son of Satan, was awake for the first time in thirty-three years. And he had a fairly good idea as to why. It would be international news, surely.

But he couldn't find a radio. There were no magazines, no newspapers in the house. The television showed only a hash of static on every channel. He picked up a phone, and put it down; he didn't know who to call. Who to call, after all this time?

He had to think about this. The house suddenly seemed stuffy, smothering: the air filled with dust and dullness. He went to find some clothes. He wanted to go for a walk.

* * *

The grounds were as neglected as the house: the hedges overgrown, the brown lawn ragged, leaves clotted around the foundations that should have been raked up and burnt. It was unseasonably warm as well, like a wet autumn day rather than winter. He had played as a child on acres and acres of perfectly mowed lawns here, sat under those trees and read books as a young man. Now he walked around the house's exterior in a sweater with one elbow worn through and wool slacks and bedroom slippers without socks. He probably looked a fair madman, although at least someone had come and trimmed his hair and beard; he vaguely remembered sitting and having something clicking about his ears. Had they come once a month? Twice a year? He couldn't even remember that.

Vague, everything was vague: a hole had been burned out of his mind and his memories, and there was nothing to fill it with but ashes of what he might have done, might have achieved, if it wasn't for a cursed dagger in his back.

No, it could not be, it would not be! He started to walk faster around the house, staring up at the curtained windows as they marched by like dozens of blinded eyes … and then he came to the front of the house, and slowed.

There was something there, fastened awkwardly to the side of the house about ten feet up. It had its own little roof to protect it. It had cables coming out of it, and it was … he strained, trying to remember – it was a camera. Small, but that's what it had to be.

A camera on his house? It was pointed at his front door, and the path leading up to it. And past that the driveway was empty of cars, and the gates were closed in the distance.

He did not know who was watching through that camera. But perhaps it would be best, until he did find out who was watching, to walk the other way.

He gritted his teeth. That he should have to turn on his heel and retreat from the scheming of mere men! But those men had kept him here, for long long years. They had not murdered him – perhaps they had not dared, or had not had the right tools – but they had kept him helpless. He needed to know more, but suddenly he felt another need burning in his throat, making his eyes water with its intensity: he needed to know that he was not alone. That the Fallen Angel still had him in His sight …

He stood, grey head a little bowed; then he raised his face to the sky, defiant.

"I am here, Father. I am here– and the Nazarene is not. My Father, if Your eyes are unclouded now even as mine are, if You can hear me, I beg Your succor. Give me a sign that Your hand is not lifted from me. Father – help me …"

The cold, clammy touch on his flesh, and the hot breath following, was familiar. The location of the touch – his ankle – was not.

Damien looked down and saw a very solemn black puppy, staring up at him with deep brown eyes. There was a hint of brown around its muzzle and neck, and it had the solid build of a Rottweiler.

He bent and rubbed the puppy's ears, felt the bone and fur of it.

"On such omens are empires founded," he decided to himself, and retreated back through the side door with the puppy eager at his heels.

He decided to do a more thorough search of the house. The puppy pattered along with him, and flinched with Damien as they entered the library. The shelves were – patchy. The popular biographies, the business books, the gifts, the colorful coffee table tomes were still here: his personal collection of esoteric and Biblical research was gone. So were the paintings and sculptures he had kept here, away from ignorant eyes.

The same held true for the rest of the house: things of value missing – silverware, vases, etchings. He couldn't find his wallet, or his keys. But also things of no value: his shoes. Not a shoe, not a boot could be found. It was almost as though someone didn't want him to leave.

His bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, those were clean with vacuum marks standing out in the untracked carpet. Most of the rooms were abandoned, the furniture covered with sheets and dust, the great pots of tropical plants emptied. But he found one area that was different. The guest room on the first floor was clean, and had been refurnished. There was a new kitchenette with a refrigerator, there was a bed with the stripped sheets piled loosely at the foot of it – Pepita must clean in here as well – a couch facing some sort of thin glass box. And a pair of very worn, very large, orange and green sneakers that would not come even close to fitting him.

He sat on the couch and stared at the black glass box. The puppy jumped up beside him and nosed something out from between the sofa cushions. It was a remote control for something. For the box? He hit the ON button and looked.

The box had lit up, and was showing two people sitting at a desk and talking. The box was a television! It was showing a news program, but the picture was so sharp. He could see the marks of the comb in the man's hair, and tiny variations in the color of the woman's blazer. He stood and examined the box again; it was so thin! It was remarkable, and this is only the sort of television you had in a guestroom?

There was a CHANNEL button on the remote, and he hit it. A parade, with Santa leading it – it must be Christmas. He kept hitting the button, and saw more parades, more talking heads, football games, commercials for beer and medicines he didn't recognize and food, endless food. There were black-and-white movies and news about terrorists, bombings, snowstorms, heatwaves, disease, and many terms he didn't recognize. He itched to find some paper and start writing them down, but it could wait. There was too much to see here.

A half-hour later, and he still wasn't through all the channels. So many shows and programs and reports and movies, and on a holiday to boot. How could anyone possibly keep up?

More importantly, with all these channels, how could the greatest news of the millennium gone unnoticed?

The reborn Christ is dead – why wasn't that a headline story? At the least a streaming line of text at the bottom of the screen? Could the Nazarene have just - died? Could his opposite, his greatest enemy, God born again in mortal flesh – could he have died and no one had understood?

It was enough to make one wonder about their importance in the world.

He sat on the couch and stared, not at the television but at the sneakers. He strained, trying to remember if he had ever seen a person wearing those shoes. Surely he couldn't have overlooked them, they were truly hideous. But there was nothing. No memory of anyone coming out of this suite.

Before – there might have been someone before? Years ago, when his wound still itched, there had been a quiet man with slow, warm hands that tended to him. But then he was gone. He didn't think that man was whoever lived or stayed in these rooms. But he didn't know.

He looked, but didn't see any cameras in here. None inside the rest of the house either, which suggested that they only wanted to watch that he not get out, not watch him.

He meditatively went through the food in the kitchenette, and found steaks frozen in the icebox. He took them and put them in his kitchen to thaw. A few for the puppy, and a few for himself; why not? He presumed that he'd paid for them. That he still owned this house.

He was tired; it was only early afternoon but he was tired. He had probably done more today than he had done in years. He looked through the kitchen drawers and found a pen, and a blank notebook by the phone.

He turned on the lights this time, and sat and wrote. Wrote until his fingers cramped, until his eyes blurred. The puppy sat quietly at his feet, the only sound the tap-tap-tap of its wagging tail brushing against the side of the stool he sat on.

Who to contact, where they were, their phone numbers if he remembered them, where his bank accounts were, and the other accounts, and the people, and the secrets, and the resources…how many of these things were moved, renamed, stolen, gone, lost? How much had he lost?

And as well what new terms did he need to understand? Botnet, Facebook, ISIL, global warming … there was so much to learn.

He was coldly certain that just stepping outside and flagging down a police car was not a good first step. There would be a story in place, he suspected: an injured man, maybe eccentric, maybe dangerous, who should be kept confined. They might not be able to hurt him, but until he knew what his place was in the world, he did not want to make assumptions.

The pup stirred and he heard the scrape of pottery on the floor. He looked down and then picked up a shard of his broken oatmeal bowl. Conscientiously, he picked up all the pieces and put them beside the sink to be disposed of whenever Pepita returned.

Just because one was the Antichrist was no reason to be rude, after all.

* * *

His stomach was roiling with too much tension for him to even think of eating. He wrote until his mind was exhausted, and then he went to his bed to sleep. He gritted his teeth at the sight of it, his soft prison: how many weeks and years of his life lost in a daze, here?

The puppy hopped up and sniffed about the bed, and then curled up at the foot of it, eyes bright on Damien's face. That made him feel a little safer.

He tossed his clothes into the hamper, and slid nude between the sheets. Carefully, he arranged himself: fists at his sides, toes straight, body a hard line under the covers. Like a man falling into the depths, feet first.

Like the son of Satan, waiting to hear his Father's voice.

He did not fall asleep; he grabbed his wakefulness and thrust it away from him, soaring down into sleep. And in his sleep, he dreamed.

Heat, unbelievable heat: heat that healed and soothed and nurtured, and did not burn. A presence behind him. A hard, scaly hand laid between his shoulder blades. A shadow, black as eternal night, streaming out into eternity before him, dividing the boiling light of Hellfire. A shadow not his own, crowned with horns.

"Father," he breathed.

MY CHILD, came the reply in words of absolute power, of total authority and righteousness. YOU HAVE BEEN FAR FROM ME.

"Yes, Father. But I have returned. I am still here, and the Nazarene is – gone."

HE IS DEAD, AND HE WILL NOT RISE.

Damien felt himself grin in his dream, a grin so wide that it made his cheeks ache. His eyes felt like they were reflecting the heat around him, concentrating it, burning like embers in his skull.

I MUST BE CERTAIN THAT YOU ARE STRONGER THAN HE. I SHALL SEND DEMONS TO YOU.

What? Why would-

YOU MUST BE TESTED. YOU, AND THE OTHER. FOR THREE DAYS YOU SHALL FACE ALL THE TORMENTS OF HELL TURNED AGAINST YOU. IF YOU SURVIVE, MY SON, YOU WILL BE STRONG ENOUGH FOR THE TASK THAT I SHALL SET TO YOU.

His mind skipped over the mysterious 'other' and focused on the word 'task.' His only task had ever been the prophecy, the great battle, the ruling over Earth for a thousand years. The End Times, Revelation, all the acts and symbols flickered through his dreaming brain.

"What task, Father?"

THE LORD REBORN HAS DIED. NO MIRACLE WILL RETURN HIM TO THE WORLD.

Damien suddenly felt claws, teeth, tongues touching all over his body. A stippling over his bare skin, from head to toe, but none of them moved, none of them struck or pierced him: they only waited, invisible in the darkness, and he felt the damned breath of demons billowing against his flesh. So different from the breath of a living thing; the breath of a demon was unmistakable. The shadows began to boil and distort around him as invisible Things made him their focus. But he had attention for only his Father's words.

RAISE ME AN ARMY, DAMIEN. BREAK ME FREE OF THE PIT. I SHALL TAKE HEAVEN FOR MY OWN.

FOR GOD IS DEAD!


	2. So Much The Better

Damien woke up in the master bath, sore over every inch of his body. He stank, of days-old sweat and his own waste. He winced as he climbed out of the tub and tottered over to the full-length mirror.

He was flushed and filthy and wild-looking. But he looked at himself and laughed, laughed loud and long. He blinked and felt two eyes, tongue still in his mouth, all his teeth and toes and fingers and other just as useful parts still in place. His scalp ached, his skin felt sandpapered, and every joint of his body felt overstrained, but he was here entire.

He had wrestled the forces of Hell for three days, and come out the other side whole.

He had never felt more his Father's son.

The mess in the bathtub extended to the floor – no, that wasn't his mess. The black puppy was hunched into the corner, looking abashed.

Well, he could say all of the mess was from the pup. He rinsed off himself and the tub, and went to find something to eat without bothering to put on clothes.

A mystery solved in the kitchen: the plate of thawing steaks was empty, except for a few gristly scraps. The pup must have jumped up on the counter to get at them. He swept the scraps together on the soiled plate, and then paused.

He felt eyes on him.

He turned and looked out the French doors in the next room, and saw a sharp-beaked silhouette peeking through the crack in the curtains. The raven pecked at the doorframe and let out a single metallic squawk.

Slowly, as though he was walking underwater, Damien went to the door and opened it. He had to shove it a little against the weight of the decayed leaves, but it opened. The tree outside was flocked thick with ravens, black against the blue sky. All staring at him.

He held out the platter in his left hand, invitingly. He watched as the ravens fluttered their wings, none of them daring to approach him. Then the one at his feet flapped its wings, and rose into the air, snatching a bit of gristle as it went.

That set the rest of them to moving, dropping off the tree, flapping hard to keep level as they struck at the plate of scraps with hard, unforgiving beaks. Over and over again, Damien saw himself reflected in their black eyes. He whispered to them as they fed, "Now I bring you spoiled meat and reeking flesh. My eyes where I have none. My will, where I am not."

His Father's beasts, returned to him.

He went to find some clothes, and his notebook. He'd lost a little more time, but gained a wealth of information and personal determination. He had such works to do, now.

* * *

He was dressed and writing in the kitchen when he heard the front door open in the distance. His eyes darted to the calendar: an arrow showed that someone was coming today, the 29th, instead of on Monday. It must be Pepita. Unless…no, he could allow himself no doubt.

He wanted to grab her and shake her and make her tell him everything that had happened, all of it: but he didn't want to scare her off. Silent as any forest beast in his bare feet, he slid out of his seat and padded into the next room.

He watched from the shadows as she walked heavily into the kitchen, carrying large bags that probably contained this week's groceries. He moved smoothly to stand in the doorway, staring at her back as she looked at the broken shards of bowl on the counter. Consciously, he drew on all his charm, all his charisma, and felt it bleed out through his skin in a glow that almost felt liquid and visible.

"Hello," he said, and she jumped and squeaked at she turned to him. She was old, bags under her eyes, both hands clutching at her worn purse of cheap leather. Her clothes were cut strangely, but clearly were not of high quality.

"I'm sorry to startle you. It's – Pepita, isn't it? I don't know your Christian name I'm afraid."

"P-Pepita Velazquez," she stuttered, staring at him. She must recognize him, yes?

"Mrs. Velazquez, hello," he said, staring at her and letting his presence have its affect on her. "I'm Damien Thorn. I don't believe we've been properly introduced." His smile was reflected in her eyes, and his heart shuddered with delight at that first, wonderful taste of her interest. Of her attention.

"I – I know you are. I mean – I've been here for – I've been cleaning here for twelve years. But you, you're –"

"I'm feeling much better today," he said, moving a step closer – and watching her just barely flinch back. He stopped, at once.

She was afraid of him. Not mortally afraid, but – perhaps they had told her stories, about what he might do. Lies, all of them. What he could do would be worse than their most fevered imaginations – but not to this little brown lady, no. She was going to help him.

"But I think I need to see someone. Surely there must be someone I can talk to."

Her eyes darted nervously to the phone. "There's a number on the-" and her voice died. The notebook was gone.

"This number here?" he said, picking up the notebook from the counter (which brought him three steps closer to her). The number was written on the cover in bold numbers, and a handwriting he did not know. "Whose number is it? I'm afraid I don't recognize it." A little self-deprecating laugh, right there, that's it. Let her feel the warmth of his own attention. Let her learn to want it, and then need it.

She was still frightened, and he could tell from the way she clutched the purse to her that she was thinking about dashing for the door. He could stop her, certainly: one woman was no match for him. But if his will could not overwhelm hers, he would either have to kill her or send her out to report to whoever she was working for. Probably, almost certainly, the people who had walled him up here, minus a cask of Amontillado, to rot in silence.

He had held a President with his eyes, he had walked into business meetings around the world and had every powerful executive fawning at his feet, and now his future balanced on holding one person, for just long enough...

A scratching of nails in the doorway, and the puppy came blundering to his feet, wagging its tail. Perfect. He scooped the puppy up and held it close to his chest, scratching under its chin with one hand.

"There's rather a mess upstairs in the master bath. I heard this little fellow barking and I couldn't leave him out in the cold, now could I? But there were no newspapers to put down for him, and-"

He stopped speaking, because the beast had done its puppy magic. Mrs. Velazquez' eyes had softened, and she put down the purse and came over and scratched the puppy behind the ears, and it wriggled all over with happiness. What could be more safe and sweet than an old man and a little puppy?

"Mrs. Velazquez," he touched her wrist with his fingertips, and watched that touch ripple up to her eyes, "I really do need to talk to someone – I need to get this little scamp to a vet for a checkup – but I don't want to bother anyone important right now, at the end of the year. I'm sure they're all taking vacation. If you could just find me a phone book, I could look up an old friend of mine and he'll help me. I don't want to cause any trouble, not during the holidays."

The hook was baited with reasonableness and puppy kisses and strong blue eyes, and she swallowed it.

"I suppose I could – look up a number for you."

"Of course! I know just who to call." And in that instant his mind flickered through the dozens, hundreds of names that he had thought of, and reviewed, and struck off his mental list. There was no one, no one he could trust, not really, and it was enough to make him howl like the beast that he was inside. But suddenly a name was there, on the tip of his tongue.

"Daniel Neff – Sergeant Neff, really. He was my platoon leader at Davidson Military Academy, and he loves dogs. He lives in Wisconsin, but I just can't remember his number. He'll know what to do." And while Mrs. Velazquez rummaged through her purse, he wondered: why that name? Was it a sign? Possibly. All his life he had followed hints, feelings, because they often led him truer than the clunky blocks of rational thought.

She pulled out a small silver slab that reminded him irresistibly of the giant television he'd found, especially when it lit up in her hand. That was really impressive, there had been so many advances in electronics while he had been – away, incapacitated – and he wondered how much Thorn Industries was involved.

She tapped at the device and typed on little keys that appeared, and he watched and made look-at-that! noises and let the puppy wag its tail and look adorable. The little silver thing displayed pictures as well as text, and she tapped at it some more and then handed it to him.

The device purred in his hand, distractingly. "What?"

"It's calling him."

He put down the puppy and held the device to his ear, blinking. This thing was a phone book and a phone? "I'll reimburse you for any long distance charges," he said distractedly.

"Oh don't worry Mr. Thorn, I've got plenty of minutes! I'll just put the groceries away." She turned and went to work, and Damien not-casually turned a shoulder to her, listening to the device purr and purr in his ear. What if-

A click, and a voice. "Hello?"

He knew that voice, and a knot of tension he hadn't even been aware of untied itself somewhere in his spine. He put the puppy down to let it wander off. "Good morning, Sergeant Neff. How are you?"

"Sergeant? I haven't – who is that?"

"It's Damien Thorn, Sergeant – I'm sorry, I should call you Daniel, shouldn't I? Old habits die hard," he chuckled, and his eyes looked murder at Mrs. Velazquez's turned back. He was going to have to speak very carefully. "I was calling to wish you a Merry Christmas."

Neff's voice deepened in a mixture of eagerness and fear. "Damien – Mr. Thorn – _where are you?"_

"I'm at home at the Thorn Estate, and I was wondering if you could give me a little advice. I just found a puppy running about – now now, stop bothering Mrs. Velazquez – and I know you're a real dog lover. Do you know any vets in the area?"

Neff caught on at once. "You're not alone. Are you safe?"

"Yes, yes, of course. I know it's the holidays, but surely someone-"

"Don't call anyone else. Please. Mr. Thorn, I can be there in – in a few hours. Tonight." A frantic clattering in the background of the call; was Neff typing?

"All right, let me get a pen," he grabbed it and the notebook and wrote out, "It's Mr. L-e-f-t-s-y-d-e and the number is … hold on …that's eight seven two, four oh four, twenty hundred." He hoped Neff would pick it up.

"I'll come to the left side of the house, at twenty hundred hours. Will you be alone by then?"

"Certainly! I really appreciate this, Daniel. Thanks for taking my call."

"I hear and obey," Neff breathed.

"Good-bye." He took the phone away from his ear and handed it to Mrs. Velazquez. "Thank you so much. Why don't I get out of your way? I'll just call the veterinarian from the other phone in the living room." And there he went, and picked up the phone and dialed it and had a short, witty, entirely imaginary conversation about bringing his puppy in for a check-up. (Out of sight, under the table edge, his hand held the phone cord unplugged.)

"All done," he said to himself but also for someone else's ears, and then settled down to wait.

Waiting was one of the hardest things that he had done – well, since the previous three days. Compared to that, a few hours sitting and resting would be as nothing. But there was no newspaper to read, all of his most interesting books were gone, and he didn't want to show too much familiarity with the refurbished guest room apartment – it was entirely possible that he wasn't supposed to know about it.

Mrs. Velazquez left for her next job (she had said that she worked in many houses); he smiled and thanked her for all her hard work. Once she was gone he could pace, fast, hard enough that the legs of his slacks whistled against one another, a wavering tuneless song with no meaning but madness behind it.

This was – he knew what the problem was, he was blind. Nothing he could remember, in any book in or out of the Bible, told him what to do now. No prophecy for him to follow or interpret. He had no guidance, no path.

He gave the puppy a frozen steak to gnaw on; his own meat he barely seared, leaving it hot and red and running in the centre. He ate it with hard, gnashing bites, watching the sun set slowly, so slowly. Watching the hands of the clocks move like molasses in the winter, like heating maple syrup and pouring it onto snow and watching it sag and cool and eating it like candy. He used to do that with Mark.

He didn't want to think about Mark Thorn. He thought about Neff. The Sergeant had always known just the words to use to send him shooting in the right direction, like Neff was the gun and he was the bullet. He would be old now, going on eighty-five. He hoped that he was the right person to call.

It was twenty hundred hours – eight o'clock. It was dark, and the glow of Chicago shone cold on the horizon. He went to the east side door and opened it, letting himself be silhouetted against the light. He felt the coolness creep in around his bare ankles. But there was a faint, uneven rasping coming closer. It sounded like-

"Kill that light!" came a harsh whisper out of the darkness, and Damien without hesitation turned off the switch at his elbow. There was a clatter, a thump and someone squeezed past him.

Damien closed the door and reached out, taking his visitor's elbow in the dark and guiding him unerringly to the next room. He'd always had excellent night vision. He closed the door behind them, sealing them away from the hallway and the windows, and finally turned on a light.

Sergeant Daniel Neff was older, dryer, leaner. Lines that had been barely visible in the military academy lay over his skin like scars. A dark knit hat covered his hair, and his eyes were riveted on Damien's face.

He looked smaller now. Damien had first met Neff when he was twelve, and he supposed that for some part of him the Sergeant would always be a tall signpost leading the way, but now he realized that Neff was actually an inch or two shorter than him.

Damien held his hands out, as though displaying himself. Grey beard, grey hair; a sweater and slippers and slacks, probably the very image of a somewhat dotty painter or – ha! – an eccentric priest. "Well?" he asked.

Neff came one step closer, then one more. Damien felt himself tense, but Neff only took him by the shoulders and pressed his cold cheek to his. He could feel tears running from the other man's eyes.

The puppy pranced up and wriggled between Neff's feet, smiling and yipping in doggy joy.

And Damien knew that everything was going to be just fine.

* * *

Mrs. Velazquez was driving home, after another long tiring day. The back of her minivan slid slightly with every turn, as the weight of vacuum cleaners and other cleaning supplies shifted. Her hands and eyes handled the shifting, of slightly too-worn tires slipping on wet roads, without any thought. All of her thoughts were somewhere else.

Her employers had told her, several times, that she should call them at once if Mr. Thorn ever talked to her, or tried to leave the house when she was there. They had been clear, but there had also been something – insulting about them. Explaining it to her oh so carefully, as though she wasn't intelligent enough to understand. As if there was something dangerous about one man, alone in his house, and apparently lost inside himself.

As she did not consciously think about her driving, she also did not notice the raven that flew above her moving van. It flapped, hard, and when it tired it veered aside and another raven took its place. For all this day, she had been under their black and inhuman gaze, and they would watch all night as well, unless they felt some impulse to do something else.

The impulse was coming.

About a mile ahead of the van, there was an overpass with a metal sign on it. The sign was streaked with rain from the roadway over it, and that water had been slowly, patiently rotting away at the bolts holding the sign to the concrete for years. Now, tonight, enough bolts were broken or worn thin that a gust of wind, or the tiniest weight – say, that of a bird – would be enough to pull it loose.

Mrs. Velazquez's mouth was a hard white line as she thought of those men, old men, and how they looked at her like a child. How they talked down to her. Well, she could figure things out for herself! Mr. Thorn wasn't dangerous, he was just sick and he was getting better. He'd said so. He had said that he would call the number, himself, as soon as the holidays were over. That would be fine. No need for her to call.

When she made that decision, she relaxed for an instant, and then everything happened at once.

There was a screech in her left ear, a thunder against the window glass, and she gave a shriek of fear and turned the steering wheel to the right, trying to swerve away from whatever was there. Everything was moving at once, the thing beside her, the traffic barriers coming towards her bumper, she tried to look in all her mirrors at once for other headlights and saw nothing, and something huge fell out of the darkness and went BANG! against the road, just behind her.

She stepped on the brakes, slowing, coming out from under the overpass and pulling over. The breakdown lane was half-full of trash, but she pulled over as far as she could anyway, opened the window, and looked back.

She saw the highway cut off in a slanted line. Something was – oh my God, it was the overpass sign! It had fallen, one end had fallen down right into her lane, and if she hadn't swerved just then it would have come down and – my God, my God. All right, what to do. Her son Samuel had left roadside supplies in a box in the back, and she went around and fished them out, wading through the trash rather than stepping into the lane. He'd drilled that into his mother, telling her over and over again how dangerous it was to walk on the highway, even for a step.

Flares, there were flares. She pulled off the tops and put them in front of the sign, moving fast, but there were no cars coming. She would call the police as soon as she was back in the van. She dropped the third flare, and saw a little bundle of blackness on the asphalt. She touched it; it was warm.

She picked it up, carefully, feeling it hang weightless and loose in her hand. It was a bird – a crow, she thought. It must be the bird that had flown at her window and scared her so – scared her away from the falling sign. And then flown into the sign, unable to stop.

Poor thing. It seemed perfectly natural to cradle the bundle of feathers in her arm as she went back to the van and called 911 to tell them about the sign. She had to explain exactly where she was twice, and she nearly jumped out of her skin when the bird flexed and shivered against her.

She rolled down the window and watched, fascinated, as it awkwardly climbed to the sill, shook itself all over, and then flapped away into the darkness. It was gone in a few seconds.

"Godspeed," she whispered, and then drove away.


	3. Then There Were Three

Sergeant Neff (now Captain Neff, retired) was sitting on the couch: sitting most definitely at attention. His hair had faded from brown to grey; he looked like a dry, tired version of his younger self. Like the oldest kitchen knife in the drawer, nicked and worn – but that always was the blade that had the sharpest edge.

His eyes were like liquid magnets, clinging to Damien's face as he paced back and forth, speaking, fingers moving in little dismissive flicks.

"Nothing here – no messages, no books, no people. No shoes!" He pointed at his slippered feet with a flash of fury, then stopped and smiled at how ridiculous he must sound.

He sat across from Neff, and looked at him, and smiled again. "It is very good to see you, Daniel. Because I need your guidance. You never led me false as a boy, and so now I ask you: what happened to me? What happened that I was left here, like this?"

Neff took off his hat and put it on the coffee table, his grey and white hair disordered. He ran his fingers through it, collecting his thoughts. Damien waited, almost patiently. He was asking for thirty-plus years of history, this would probably take a while.

Neff began, his voice taking on the cadence of a military briefing almost instantly. "You were found, stabbed, in a ruined cathedral. The priest Father DeCarlo and Kate Reynolds, the journalist, were found and taken by the authorities. DeCarlo admitted to stabbing Peter Reynolds, who was found dead, and Kate Reynolds admitted to stabbing – you." A quick wince of hatred in those words, then he went on. "You were given the best medical care, but you never really regained consciousness. When you were awake, you talked about drowning, about burning. The people in charge moved you into private care as soon as they could, tried everything they could think of."

"Are you sure?" Quiet and dark those words from Damien, and dark his eyes.

"No. I wasn't sure then and I am even less sure now. Father DeCarlo was taken back by the Vatican, it was a huge diplomatic incident. But – Kate Reynolds was put on trial, or was going to be, but it turned out she couldn't attend in person. She was on twenty-four-hour suicide watch, in restraints. She was pregnant."

Neff stopped and let Damien work out the implications of that. Damien did, his own mouth a hard line. He had thought that – no, he must have spilled in her after all. Enough, anyway, to impregnate her.

"And the child? A boy?" Of course it had been a boy, and these idiots –

"No, a girl. Delia. She was taken from the mother as soon as she was born, of course, and hidden by us. They said she would be raised in secret, adopted by the appropriate family when the time was right. And then, when Delia was eight … do you know what _fetus en fetu_ is?"

Damien raised his eyebrows, willing the knowledge to rise up in him – and it did, as it always did. "Twins that merge in the womb; sometimes one is born and grows to be an adult with the remains of the twin concealed inside. So Delia-"

"They took a viable fetus from her, a boy, and put him in her adopted mother's womb to mature. Alexander. He bore the Mark, and we were told that he was your reincarnation."

Damien's face and voice were completely flat when he said, "I do not think that reincarnation works that way. I was – I am – still alive."

Neff's eyes flamed with fury. "The ritual had not been completed. Yes, you were struck down on sacred ground, but there was only one dagger used, not seven! But Buher and his people, they said you were comatose, a shell kept alive by machines. We believed, we wanted to believe, that your soul had been passed on and could lead us again."

"And nobody came to talk to me?"

Neff squared his shoulders against the back of the couch. "People tried – and they died. I don't know if it was your Father's power protecting you, or murders made to look like accidents. But to approach you was to die."

Damien shook his head like a dog, then scratched the head of the puppy that lay devotedly at his feet. "I was – stunned. Numb. But I was still here, still alive! How could they elevate a baby over me?"

"It was a mistake." Neff was staring at his feet now, talking a little louder. "You, Damien, were raised with every precaution and care, to shield you from the knowledge of your destiny until you were ready. Alexander was cosseted by his sister and everyone around him from birth. He knew what he could be as soon as he could talk, and when power rose in him, he used it. He lashed out at anyone who defied him, anyone who contradicted him, anyone who tried to refuse him anything.

"He was – grotesque, bloated, arrogant in his ignorance. There was no question of him ever taking up the reins of power, and truly he had no interest in them. He wanted food and rutting and that was all, and nobody dared defy him. He was supposed to corrupt the world, and instead the world corrupted him utterly. And this," Neff rose to his feet, "this whining brat, this idiot-child was praised and adored as Satan's true son, while you wasted away here in the dark!"

Damien rose too. He stepped forward and took Neff's shoulders.

He spoke reassuringly to the older man. "I was always here, and now I have returned. I will call to the truly faithful and they will hear my call."

Neff looked like he was about to cry. "I want that to be true, but there are so many gone. So many who have walked away from the shadows, so many who are too old or too weak to stand by your side. Even I-"

Damien interrupted him with a shake of the head. "No, no. You look in better shape than me!"

They shared a smile; it was true. Neff might be twenty years Damien's senior but his belly was flat, his arms were tight with muscle, and he moved like a soldier.

"So." Damien took his seat again, and cocked his head as though he was asking the most innocuous question in the world. "Where is Alexander now?"

"I don't know. They keep him isolated, feeding him information, controlling what he knows. I don't know why he doesn't see their lies for what they are, but … he is an assassin for them. He kills as they ask, and pleasures himself, and nothing more. But I will find him." Neff brooded for an instant as he sat, eyes hooded. "I will."

He blinked, and then scowled. "There's a name on the tip of my tongue. White. Fallyn White, she works at the company headquarters in Chicago. She's in advanced computer systems research: very hush-hush stuff, very high level. I met her last year, and the way she spoke about you … I believe that she is true to you. She could probably find out where Alexander is now. And," he reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone like the housekeeper's, "she gave me a number once, and a password, and said I could call it if I wanted to talk about you in private."

"Fallyn White." Damien had never heard the name, had no face or voice to associate with it, but he let it loll in his mind for a moment, let those senses that were not quite human snuffle at it. This was what he did when he looked at a crowd and picked out the traitors, read a list of executives and knew who could be distracted, seduced, corrupted…

He felt – nothing. Neutral. And then softly and quietly, that tiny voice of certainty spoke to him from deep inside.

"Call her, please. See if she'll talk to us now."

Neff nodded, and typed in the number; he said there was some way to store numbers in the phone but she had told him never to do that. He put the phone down on the table and it buzzed, and when Damien looked at him said only, "It's in speaker mode."

A portable speaker phone. That would have made onsite meetings so much easier … but then the phone stopped buzzing, and beeped, once.

Neff leaned towards it, and said his name. The phone beeped again, and he said, "Clove."

The phone clicked and rustled, the sound of sheets being thrown back, and a sleepy voice said, "Fallyn here…Mr. Neff, this is important, I hope?"

"I'm calling you from the Thorn estate. Damien Thorn is awake."

A gasp that was almost a sob. "Who else is there? _Is he all right?"_

"I'm fine, Miss White," Damien said, ignoring Neff's frantic gestures to be quiet. He could know everything he needed to know if she was physically present now, just by reading her face and her hands and her mind, but he thought that he could get a good bead on her over the phone. "And it's just me and Captain Neff here. But I am in considerable mental distress. I've been out of contact with everything for so long…"

He could hear her breathing faster, almost thought he could hear her heart beating faster.

"Tell me what you need, Mr. Thorn." That tone, of absolute obedience, of total commitment to fulfilling his will, how he had missed it!

He gathered his thoughts, and laid down his requirements. The state of Thorn Industries, the location of his _soi-disant_ heir Alexander, a summary of world events especially anything related to Biblical prophecy, anything about the Nazarene.

"I will have to pull some data. Do you have a laptop there? – never mind, I'll bring you a clean one. A burner phone. I will be there at midnight at the latest, Mr. Thorn. Please, please don't talk to anyone else!"

"I don't intend to," he replied. He waited while Neff gave her a quick outline of how she should get into the house without being seen.

"I will be there at midnight, then." A hard click, and apparently the call was over.

Damien looked at Neff, who looked a little blown. "Is she always that – enthusiastic?"

"She's half-asleep, she's normally a lot more enthusiastic. She's the perfect person to help you."

"Well." Damien wet his lips with his tongue. "I think what I need from you is information. I have names," he picked up his notebook, "people, places I know, resources – would you be willing to read through this and write down what you know? Who is living, who is not. Who is faithful, and who has left my path."

"Of course." Neff took the notebook and paged to the beginning, and Damien sat back, fiddling with the creases of his slacks (barely there, apparently his clothing was not being taken to a very reputable dry-cleaner. Aloud but to himself, he said, "I wish I had-"

A small book, bound in heavily worn black leather, was in Neff's hand and held out to him. A smile in his voice matched the one on his face as he said, "- a Bible? Don't leave home without it."

Damien reached out and clasped Neff's hand and the Bible in both of his. For a moment he thought he could feel a memory from Neff's past, him in the sweating jungle, reading from this book and then staring into the distance, ignoring the mosquitoes and the screams and the smell of decay, wondering when those final trumpet calls would ring out.

Very soon, if Damien had his way.

"Thank you, Daniel," he said, sincerely, before taking the Bible and sitting back. How many hours of his life had he spent between the pages of this book, in all its different translations and versions? How reassuring to have it again in his hand: he knew many long passages of it by heart, and of course the Book of Revelation was always burnt within him. Neff was engrossed in the notebook, making little marks after each name; Damien could relax. He had an ally, two allies, and so much to do!

Now, as was his habit, he opened it at random and read the first verse he saw.

Philippians 4:13. **I can do all things through him who strengthens me.**

Inspiring words, really.

* * *

It was nearly midnight when they both were roused by the sound of scratching from the hallway – or from the door to the outside. The puppy at Damien's feet growled, but kept still at his gesture.

Neff looked a little perturbed when Damien stood with him and went to let their guest in. Really, it would be unmannerly to let someone else do it. And he wanted to get a feel for this person, right up front. If Neff was right about how high she was within Thorn Industries, she would probably be doing a lot of work for him.

The lights were still out in the hallway, and outside was only the blue-grey gloom of the groundsunder the dim moonlight. Neff opened the door and a hunchbacked figure slipped inside. No, not hunchbacked; wearing a backpack. It spoke in the same breathy voice they'd heard over the phone.

"Captain Neff?"

"Here," he said, and the figure came close and took him by the arm.

"Captain, I know some very discreet medical people, who can get us access to the best facilities. If we need to move him, we can do it tonight, I could call them now-"

"That won't be necessary, "Damien said from the darkness, and she froze. She came a step or two further into the hallway and stopped, her body tensed.

Damien let himself come forward a carefully measured amount, until the light streaming from the next room just touched his face, showing her the outline of his beard, the glow of one blue eye. Would she recognize him, even now?

She swallowed audibly, then spoke in a voice that quivered with excitement. "I joined the United Nations Youth Council as soon as there was a chapter in my area. I was seven. I never met you personally, but I read everything you wrote. I read the articles over and over again, until the paper got all frayed at the corners. When they said you had been killed, or not quite killed..." Her voice dropped.

He came forward a little farther, and she moved to meet him. In the light he saw she was only a few inches shorter than his own six feet, with dark hair and eyes that looked black. Her pale face was immaculately made up, and her lips were parted in what could be fear or ecstasy.

He could see her face; now he reached to touch her mind. He felt the glow of adoration in her, like the moon shining through her skin. Throbbing, passionate devotion, layered through and through the core of her. She knew him and she was his, utterly and completely.

"I," she stuttered, "it's a pleasure to meet you. Sir." Tentatively she held out her hand; and he took it in his, feeling it cold and faintly shivering at his touch.

"I'm sure the pleasure will be mutual." He smiled, teeth gleaming. "Shall we go inside, then, and begin?"

In the light of the living room, he could see that Fallyn was not conventionally attractive: too intense, too intelligent-looking, and her body was not fat, but certainly not slim. He wanted to say matronly, but there was nothing of the mother about her.

Her eyes, a blue so dark they were almost black, were examining the room, Neff, and Damien, and always returning back to Damien.

"You don't look how I expected," she said to him. "I thought you'd be – emaciated. From being in the coma for so long."

"I was not in a coma," he said, one eyebrow twitching. "There was misinformation given about my condition, and I look forward to correcting it."

There was a whuffing noise by Damien's leg, and he looked down to see the puppy stepping forward. This would be interesting. A second test on her loyalty: if she was false, his Father's beast would attack. If necessary he would hold Fallyn down to let the beast savage her, taking her apart one tiny bite at a time.

Fallyn saw the puppy and gracefully slid down onto one knee, turning her head aside to see out of the corner of her eye. She held out one hand, palm down, and let him sniff her fingers. He did so, yipped, and went to sit back by the couch. She rose and smiled up at Damien, and there was a tiny glitter of cynicism in among the worshipfulness and awe. If the dog liked her, then surely everything was all right.

They sat down, Damien on one couch and Neff and Fallyn on the other. Fallyn started to shrug out of her coat, unbuttoning the jacket under it – and Neff suddenly reached towards her, and froze. Fallyn froze as well, and then very slowly, very carefully, she reached under her coat and pulled out a small, black-gleaming gun, which she held out to Neff, butt-first. After a moment, he took it and examined it, then put it down on the table.

"Was that necessary?" he asked.

"I'm going to a strange house, at night, on the premise of one phone call. You know how the ones on top now" (a gesture with one rude finger) "like to trick people into disloyalty."

"How did you know it wasn't a trick?" Damien asked, while making a mental note to find out who was deceiving his people –that was his job - and punishing them accordingly.

"No trap would say that you were awake. If I sent out a Tweet or an email that you were awake, there's be, ah."

"Hell to pay," Damien finished her thought.

"Exactly." Fallyn pulled her backpack around, putting it in front of her. She reached in and pulled out an envelope, and quickly scooped out a thick sheaf of crisp hundred-dollar bills. At least he thought they were hundred-dollar bills, they looked like play money, with giant portraits of Ben Franklin (the old lecher) and glittering foil lines across them. "Ten thousand – it's all I had loose on hand," she said, stacking the money and neatly sliding it towards Damien.

Both Neff and Damien looked at her, a bit put out.

"It's the end of the year, I'm low on funds," she said defensively, but that was not what had bothered the two men.

"I have plenty of money," Damien pointed out, as though to a child.

"Oh? Where are your bank cards? Where's your identification? Everything you have is thirty years out of date and none of the photos look like you. Sure, you can go to your bank, but how will you prove you are Damien Thorn?"

"You know who I am," he replied. Actually he was pleased by her initiative, and by her willingness to correct him. Being surrounded by yes-men, or yes-women, was not what he needed.

"I believe. Others might not. But if you are all right, medically all right, then there's nothing stopping you from proving who you are and taking it all back. I've been ready for this for years. I knew there would only be one chance."

"One chance for what?" Damien asked.

She was nearly quivering with excitement as the words came spilling out. "Mr. Thorn, you are the majority shareholder in Thorn Industries. On the surface, a closely held, old-fashioned company that isn't leading the way in anything these days. Under the surface, Thorn has a hand in everything, everywhere. Not a mouth is fed or a bullet fired without Thorn profiting somewhere along the line. Everything is done through shell companies and proxies. There are trillions of dollars riding on control of what the company does, and they've just been slinking along and hoping that you would never wake up. Maybe even doing what they could to keep you from ever waking up."

She looked around the room, hard-eyed. Sniffed the air. "You don't have any medical staff in attendance, I'm guessing? Or life support equipment, therapy equipment-"

"There's nothing here like that," Damien said a little too quietly. "A housekeeper comes in once a week, and there's a guest suite that someone's been living in, but except for that, nothing."

Rage flowered in her expression, and was immediately swallowed down. "Isn't it strange, then, that Thorn Industries is billing your estate nearly a million dollars a year for maintenance, medical support, and long-term in-house care staff?"

All three of them seemed to growl together; even the dog shuffled where it lay, fur ruffling.

"They are bleeding you dry, Mr. Thorn. If they can somehow drain the family fortune to the point that your shares have to be sold, they'll buy them – and own the company entire. Inflation had already cut your wealth by two-thirds. The company is still privately held, and they've been misreporting the value of the shares and the company for decades."

"Who's in charge?"

"Paul Buher."

"Still?"

"Why not? You did sign the paperwork giving him authority, when you took the ambassadorship in '82."

"That was a legal fiction," he said, overenunciating a little bit as he tended to do when he needed to drive a point home. "He and I knew that I was to remain in control, that he was to do nothing without my approval."

"Well. According to him, you could not give your approval for anything. So he has run Thorn Industries as he pleased for the last thirty-plus years. He must have known your true condition, but he has reported to the press and to the Board that you were in a mute coma all this time. Helpless, speechless, no more than a breathing corpse."

Damien deliberately did not answer, letting his rage cool for a moment. He could feel his power boiling inside of him, demanding that he send death and destruction to Paul Buher, to all the Board, here and now: but he would not. Not until he knew every detail of their treachery. Not until he was certain who should be sliced out and cast aside.

"Mr. Thorn, if I might ask - is there any specific reason why you came awake now? Is it something we should have known about?" She sounded very worried as she glanced at Neff and then back to him.

Damien took a deep breath. This required a little more emphasis than he had given his previous words. He stood and stepped away from them both, staring at the wall for a second, gathering his thoughts and ordering them perfectly.

He turned and announced, "The Nazarene is dead."

Both Fallyn and Neff jumped.

"I awoke and his presence sapping me was gone. His light has gone out of the world. He is dead, and he will not rise again: my Father has promised it."

Neff's eyes were wide, seeming to drink in his words. What it must be like for him, to live in these times, to see the prophecies come alive in front of him.

"And this was on the twenty-sixth?" Fallyn asked.

Damien looked at Fallyn, a little crease appearing between his brows. "No, on the twenty-fifth. I awoke that morning, and I was free."

"I – that's not what I was expecting." She didn't look happy at the news of the death of the arch-enemy; she looked sad. Like she knew something that she didn't want to say.

"And what were you expecting, Miss White?" he said, keeping the growl out of his voice but letting the words hang in the air, with the weight of their own menace.

She swallowed, and said, "You asked me to tell you about Alexander."

"My replacement." His upper lip curled at the thought.

She was shaking her head, and her voice dropped again. "Never that. But – I hate to tell you this but … Alexander and Delia are dead."


	4. The Nazarene's Fate

Dead. His children were dead. They were – he had never even met then, not known of their existence until a few hours ago, and now they were dead? Had he done that?

"He died on the night of the twenty-fifth," she continued lowly, staring at the hollow of his throat as though afraid to meet his eyes. "It was a birthday party for Alexander, with all the trimmings. He got angry, agitated, he jumped in a car and demanded to be driven somewhere, and Delia drove him because she was his sister and she always did, and there was an accident. Their bodies were found in the wreckage and they were – torn apart."

Damien sat down, slowly, letting the weight of the words fall down on him. Dead, dead the day he awoke…and then he remembered.

"I prayed to my Father, and he spoke to me. He said that I would be tested, for three days, and that 'the other' would be tested as well. He must have meant Alexander. We were tested. He failed."

Simple as that? Hardly simple. He didn't have any words to attach to the idea of having a son, of having children: it was something he had thought he would do after his rise to power, when he had all the nations of the Earth to choose a bride from. He fumbled at the thought of parenting, teaching a baby to walk, to speak-

To read. He imagined himself sitting at a great Book, with his son in his lap, and letting him spell out the words and the phrases of his destiny. What would have been their destiny.

And he would never have that. Someone else had taught Alexander and Delia, and now they were gone, that line of his life cut off forever.

"How is that possible?" Neff wondered aloud. "Not just their deaths, but how is it possible that nobody knows?"

Fallyn sniffed. "Why would they tell us? Alexander has been the heart of all their authority, the power of life and death over anyone, anywhere! Every day they keep it covered up is another day on their own personal thrones. The only reason I know it is that I saw a pattern in certain records being deleted, and once I grabbed the backup data and examined it, I realized who must have died."

After he took a little time to digest this news and all its ramifications, Damien asked the obvious question: what had the Nazarene been doing, while he had been here?

Remarkably little, according to both Fallyn and Neff. There had been a press release written by the Catholic Church in 1982, but never published, detailing the arrival of the Child and the death of the Antichrist – a little prematurely in the second case. The newspapers had bleated with enthusiasm about the whole affair, MAD MONK RAMPAGE and CHURCH ASSASSINS and apparently the embarrassment had been too much for them to take.

However, the Vatican had insisted on taking custody of Father DeCarlo, in a diplomatic incident whose reverberations were still being felt. The Church had said he would be punished; the smuggled photo showing the Pope kissing the Benedictine's feet made that rather a lie. He had lived in relative luxury, never setting foot outside of Vatican City, and had supposedly died in his sleep, peacefully, three years ago.

Kate Reynolds, who had actually stabbed him, had spent ten years in psychiatric care before being released into a nunnery that she was never to leave. The brush with higher powers (and lower ones) had apparently permanently warped her mind, and she spent her time babbling meaningless Christian platitudes. What a waste, of all that beauty and talent! Well, she had dismissed herself from his regard fairly completely by her actions, God-inspired or not.

"After I had fallen, why was the Nazarene not killed while he was still an infant?"

Neff had the answer to that. "Every person who tried was captured, and spilled everything they knew to the Church authorities. We lost people who'd been embedded for decades." Many names that Neff had struck through in Damien's notebook stemmed from those betrayals. Not killed, but dismissed from their positions in disgrace.

The Church had seemed almost embarrassed to have the Christ returned – especially once they realized that the Christ had no intention of paying any attention to their authority. He preached, they listened – but did nothing. The priests meticulously transcribed all of the Child's advice and took none of it – certainly not the part about giving all your money to the poor. He had not been heralded by the Church as the Second Coming; he had not performed any grand public miracles; he had stayed under the Church's protection until he was an adult, and then he had left of his own volition, wandering the earth under the name John Smith.

There had been multiple attempts to assassinate him once he was a wandering street preacher – all futile, of course. His God protected him. But while his flock sometimes numbered in the dozens, it never was in the hundreds. Men and women followed him, for a while, and then they wandered off or died or were institutionalized or got a job. There was never any great movement with him as his leader, no Sermon on the Mount, no grand moment of self-sacrifice or divine battle. He had just faded away, lumped in with tens of thousands of other homeless delusional men, lost in the background noise of the modern world with all its pleasures and sins.

The Second Coming came, and went, and no one even noticed. Except for Damien. And Damien knew why the Christ had not ascended to power; it was because there was no power behind him. God was dead. But he did not reveal that, not even to these, the people who had come to his call first. He wanted to be certain.

When he did reveal the truth, it would shake the Earth.

"I wonder," Fallyn said at one point, staring off into space. "You said the Nazarene was sapping you, Mister Thorn. It might explain why Alexander was so weak. He would defend himself, and compel obedience – but not the way you could. He could kill, although sometimes he had to be wheedled into it." She frowned as though at some bad memory. "All his life he lived with the Nazarene's presence burning him – he must have thought it was normal."

She blinked, an instant of sorrow flickering over her features; then she looked at Damien and decided it might not be best to mention that sorrow. She struggled for an instant, and then turned her face away and yawned, hugely.

Damien looked at the clock; it was after two. "I think it might be time for us to call it a night. Daniel, Miss White, you are welcome to stay. I have plenty of guestrooms, though they may be a bit chilly."

"I don't have any plans for the next few days," Neff said with a faint sadness in his voice – Damien would have to ask about that. Fallyn concurred that she could stay, and call in to work the next day.

He showed them where the linen closet was (fortunately the linens were still there, although the top ones were thick with dust), and to their rooms, politely wished them a good night, then returned to his own bed. He was really going to have to flip this mattress soon. And he slept, the deep and refreshing sleep that he so desperately needed, and then he dreamed.

He knew the dream was real. He had seen dreams like this all his life. Auguries, messages from Below. This was a vision meant for him, and he watched it with care, trying to commit as much as he could to memory.

He was in a room with endless cabinets; the cabinet doors were metal, and square like oven doors. The metal walls stretched as far as he could see. The ceiling glowed with whiteness overhead: recessed lighting. This was modern – he thought. It felt like a now to him, not like a future vision.

There were tables in a straight line down the middle of the room, and on those tables were bodies. Men and women, naked, mutilated, broken by disease or violence or simply time. But there was one body that was different.

He walked (or drifted, it was hard to tell in dreams) down to a table. The thing that lay there was not a man. It was a Lamb. White fleece, seven golden horns, and seven gouged sockets in its head that had been its eyes. It was the Lamb. It was the Nazarene.

Damien looked around the room, trying to see anything that would tell him where this was: a sign, a clipboard, a magazine, anything! But he saw nothing, and his hands moved without him willing it, reaching for the Lamb's head, wrenching open the stiffened jaws.

The mouth was tongueless and full of blood: the blood rose up and spilled, over his hands, over the table and floor, flowing everywhere, and it washed him awake.

* * *

He woke with his head full of his dream. Deliberately he held the vision in his mind, memorizing it. The Lamb, the Nazarene, was in a morgue, and a large one. The people who had him there did not know who he was, else why no vigil, no sobbing priests, no sterile nun-brides here to mourn the bridegroom flown forever out of their reach?

A large morgue. Tables down the middle. The bodies had been white and black and Asian – it was probably in America. The Nazarene was here, his body was here and Damien was going to take it!

A single line of sunlight showed at the top of one of his curtained windows. Good enough. There was much to be done, this day. He should see if he had anything to offer his guests besides oatmeal, for starters.

The guest room kitchenette had fresh eggs; Pepita must have restocked it. Eggs and oatmeal, not very inspiring, but his guests had no objections; they sat in the kitchen and ate together, quietly, each of them gathering their thoughts.

When they were done, Fallyn asked if she could be excused to make a phone call; Damien invited her to make it from there, and she accepted. He was curious to see how she was going to convince her boss to let her off work; these little interactions, these tiny lies, told him a lot about a person.

She gestured them both to silence and produced a phone from her coat; she tapped it and put it to her ear, and an expression of gleeful, lustful delight settled across her face.

"Hey Joseph," she smiled. "I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to be working from home today … Everyone's on vacation anyway, you know I won't get any work done … I know, I know, I'll respond to any alerts as soon as they come in. I can remote in if I have to get on top of something fast …" A longer pause as Fallyn listened, and smiled wider. "Is he handsome? Actually," she looked at Neff and Damien and smiled to the point of leering, "they're both very handsome…OK, great! Thanks, I owe you one!" She tapped the phone again, and gave a little salute.

"I'm at your disposal. Where should we begin?" she beamed.

"Handsome," Neff said flatly, and she looked him over and gave him an equitable thumbs-up.

"Workplace rules seem to have changed," Damien noted. Fallyn obviously had a much higher position than he had assumed, if she could make such outrageous requests.

"Thorn Corporation is very progressive, in some ways. My section has certain exemptions as well."

"I understand. Now, I think we need to begin with technology and history. I need to know what has happened while I've been – suppressed – and how I can get more information." Damien counted off with his fingers against the cold stone countertop, "I need to get my identity verified by my financial advisers, and all bank accounts that are accessible by people other than me frozen. I expect there's going to be a competency hearing, I'l l need to be prepared for that. Then, I will call for an emergency meeting of the Thorn Corporation Board."

His eyes darkened as his eyelids drooped. "It will have to be fast; we need to sprint to get ahead of what they can throw at us. Miss White, you said you had information about my businesses with you?"

"I do, let me get my pack. Do you know where the cable comes in?"

In the guest room (which was apparently where the cable came in), Fallyn seemed to be in her element. She sat on the couch and produced a keyboard, with a screen attached to it. She started it and the screen came alive, as colorful and sharp as the television.

"This laptop can access the Internet, and the Internet has about seventy-five percent of the answers you are looking for. The rest is here," and she nudged the backpack with her foot.

"The Internet?" He thought of the Internet as a handful of computers, what were the odds that what he needed would be on them?

"The Internet's been massively upgraded since the eighties, it is a lot bigger. It's got text, pictures, video and audio. Movies, news, music – all of it accessible, anywhere there's an Internet connection, which is the majority of the world now. People are constantly recording what happens around them and uploading it. There's a massive amount of computer-based commerce, records keeping, communications. If you can't afford a computer, you can access large sections of it using a cellphone."

Damien could feel his options expanding as his mind quickly digested the possibilities. A library that anyone could visit, at any time. Sales on the Internet that could be tracked, and numbered. And video, surveillance – that's what she meant. Anyone could call up video and see it, anywhere. Record what they saw, and share it. She handed him a somewhat shinier version of Neff's cellphone, and said it was a burner that couldn't be tracked easily.

Damien looked at the phone in his hand with almost trepidation. "It's a phone book, and a phone, and a speakerphone, and has full video and audio reception. All here, in my hand."

He looked at her and smiled wide, and watched her smile back. Oh, that adoration, how he had missed it. This was a wonderful world, and it was all his. Soon. "What does burner mean?"

"It means that it's disposable – if you think you're being tracked, just toss it. There's hundreds of millions of those phones in the world, and getting a new one set up can be done in five minutes."

"What do you mean, tracked?"

"The phone can be tracked. There's a satellite network that maps the earth, and it can follow most phones; or they can be tracked based on the cellphone signal reception. And anyone who has been in contact in you – anyone who might come to your call, who might be personally beholden to you – is tracked." She gave an apologetic nod to Neff, who was sitting and watching; Neff did not nod back.

"But I can make sure you aren't. I helped write those monitoring programs, or to be more specific I wrote the programs that wrote those programs, and I made certain they would not do certain things without my say-so." A flick of her eyebrow. "There's probably an alert in the system about you coming here, Captain Neff. It won't be passed on – in fact, I can tunnel in from here and erase it."

There was a whole world of information out there, waiting for him to explore. He was tempted, so tempted, to just let her show him how to jump in. But he had to focus himself. Sprint and get ahead.

"What can you tell me about my financial situation?"

She promptly produced a wealth of electronic documents from the laptop, showing them on the screen. The formatting was rather confusing at first, but Fallyn was very good at explaining things. Some of the charts were animated, and he could watch his stocks and savings ebb and flow with the stock market. With every year, they had trickled lower; the family office he had set up seemed to be fighting a losing battle. That battle was not helped by Thorn Corporation hobbling them in every way they could.

The finances of Thorn Corporation were much more interesting (apparently she didn't actually prepare these reports, she simply knew how to fix the computers of the people who did, and would discreetly copy off their data). Thorn Corporation had so many tentacles into so many different businesses that it was actually causing fluctuations in the world currency market: money went into the system and vanished into the company coffers, never to be seen again.

The pie charts for who controlled what shares in the public eye, and then in private, were quite interesting. Especially when she pushed a button and the numbers attached to each slice jumped from the hundreds of millions to the billions. So many quiet behind-the-scenes shifts, so many board members moving from one position of power to another, so many companies within companies, accounts within accounts.

He looked very hard, almost painfully hard, at one particular document. It was a scan of a real paper document, one of multiple pages packed with dense legalese. His own signature and initials were on it, several times. (It was a measure of how much access Fallyn had – or how good she was at stealing things – that she had a copy of this). It was the document where he gave over control of his voting shares to Paul Buher, for the duration of his ambassadorship. And buried in there, somewhere, was the provision that if he were dead or incapacitated, Paul was to remain in control.

Worthless boilerplate legalese, of course, except that he actually had been incapacitated. Which had given Paul Buher control of the largest corporation on the planet for decades. Decades that he seemed to have spent doing nothing more important, or world-shattering, than making money and rewriting the laws in order to make more money.

All his power, all his destiny, diverted in the service of a balance-sheet. It was infuriating.

Deliberately he held his fury in check; saved it up for another day. Instead he turned to Neff. "Let's talk about relevant world events – relevant to me, that is."

That took a while. A lot of things had happened in the last thirty years: several small wars, ongoing terrorist attacks around the world, major jumps in technology, huge fluxes in migrations as desperate people fled famine and plague. Nations had vanished, been renamed, had split themselves into separate states that clawed at each other like jealous siblings. More pseudo-nations had been born that existed in the realm of the Internet only: great tribes united by love or hatred, whose citizens communicated online. There was no more Soviet Union, no more Berlin Wall, but there was a European Union. Gluttony and lust reigned in the West, while religious fanaticism and starvation ruled in the Third World. It was a world ripe for a person who could make sense of it all, who could bring order where there was chaos. A person backed by a corporation more powerful than any government.

This was his world, and as Neff compared and aligned events with the Bible in his hand, Damien plotted how he would take the world into his own grasp.


	5. The Ones Who Serve

Bain McBatts hated the end of the year. It was always a mad scramble to get everything done and filed for all of his accounts, and this was the day – December 30th – when people would show up with the worst, most inane demands. Can I move these bonds here, what about the return rates on these, I heard if I do this I won't have to pay any taxes, I need confirmation that this overseas transfer went through, I have to make certain that all of my relatives get their New Years champagne gift baskets at the same time so that none of them can blab to the others…and so on.

And of course there was the Thorn account. He ran his fingers through his red hair, sighing. He remembered the day that his father had told him about meeting Damien Thorn, how even as a young man he'd felt like a man who would change the world. Damien's father Robert had built the family office of McBatts, set them to taking care of his fortune and interests. Bain's father had felt that the Thorns would be enough to support them for the rest of their lives. Well, that had not proven to be the case. Damien Thorn had – not died, but been crippled. Thorn Industries had taken over management of the Thorn physical estate, and any attempts to audit them, or even check up on their work, were met with the most pointedly specific misfortune.

Still, one had to keep faith.

He got to work early, sitting behind his heavy mahogany desk – his father's desk, actually. He had taken over the business from Dad, who was enjoying a well-deserved retirement. It was rather a surprise when Dad called him and asked to meet him in Conference Room A – and take the phone out. And leave his cellphone in his office.

That sounded good, that sounded like a new client. A big one. Bain was waiting in the conference room, paper and pen at the ready, when Dad came rolling in, followed by two unfamiliar men.

Dad moved his wheelchair to one side and gestured at the taller of the two men, who was wearing a vintage winter coat and a hat. "Son, let me introduce Mr. Damien Thorn."

Bain's jaw dropped, and stayed dropped. He couldn't believe it. After all these years …

"A pleasure," said Mr. Thorn, stepping forward and shaking his hand. He had a firm handshake, and warm blue eyes; with his beard he had a sort of Santa Claus aura around him. His suit looked vintage as well, and when he looked down Bain couldn't help but notice that the man was wearing slippers.

He glanced at Dad, who rumbled, "I've been talking to him for the last hour; this is Damien Thorn."

Bain looked at the grey-haired man, and considered. "You were supposed to be in a coma, but-"

"But I wasn't," Mr. Thorn confirmed. He certainly didn't look sickly or wasted; he seemed to glow with good health. "I was incapacitated after the stabbing, and without therapy or treatment the effect … lingered. But I was not bedridden or helpless – despite what Thorn Industries' current management claimed." His jaw firmed. "I am feeling quite recovered now. And it is time we addressed certain matters."

Bain touched his pen to paper, and then paused, looking at the third man who had not said a word so far. He had thought driver or bodyguard, but apparently not; Mr. Thorn introduced him as Daniel Neff, "an old friend of the family," and said that they could speak freely in front of him.

When Bain was ready, Mr. Thorn began. "For the past thirty-three years, I have been denied proper medical care and attention, access to my accounts, and control of the corporation that my father and his father before him built. I believe that the person or persons involved are currently working for Thorn Industries. Until I can determine exactly who has done this, I need to remove my money from their access. I want to freeze all of my accounts, at once, until further notice. That especially includes the accounts that Thorn Industries has been falsely debiting for my medical care."

After he wrote out a list of bullet points, Bain just stared at them. Freezing all of the accounts was going to be complicated, and Thorn Industries – of course it was Thorn Industries, they were running the physical estate, it had to be them – they were going to know in hours. Although with it being the holidays, maybe not.

"There's going to have to be a competency hearing," he objected. "Until then…"

"Until then, I am only asking for my accounts to be frozen until my competence can be proven. If it is not proven, well, no money will be lost. After the paperwork is filed, I'll need your help to find attorneys. The best attorneys available. I want them on retainer today; there is a separate account that your father will help you access to cover those fees. The very best, I insist on it. I am going to have work for them." Awful, dreadful work, his tone implied. "Shall we begin?"

Bain looked at his dad, sitting proud in his wheelchair. He had always leaned on him, like a rock. He had never known him to misjudge or to be deceived. But this … this was just unbelievable. Missing millionaires don't just rise from the bed they have been confined to for the last few decades (but he said he wasn't in a coma) and come walking into your office (but Dad had known Mr. Thorn very well) and … and …

"Ah, a doubting Thomas," Mr. Thorn said, and both the McBatts flinched. "Is there anything I can do to reassure you as to my bona fides? Show you the dagger wound on my back? Recite my family tree-"

Dad was wiggling in his chair; he reached down and engaged the lock on the wheels, and then painfully got out of it and sank to his knees. Bain not-quite-jumped to go to his side, and was promptly grabbed by the wrist and pulled down to his own knees.

Dad was frightened; he hadn't seen it before, but there was sweat standing out from his hairline, and his eyes were wide. What could possibly-

"Mr. Thorn," Dad said, with humility in his voice that was just as shocking as seeing him kneel, "my son is a man of great integrity, or else I would not have given him my business to run. As well, he has been given certain information, information that is held most close and most secret."

The man Neff swiveled his head from where he sat studying a small black book; he was staring at Dad, and his eyes were very cold and still.

"I ask for the favor of the true proof, of your true identity. Please."

Mr. Thorn looked down on both of them, one eyebrow raised. Then he took off his hat and bowed his head, stroking his fingers through his hair to unerringly part it at a certain spot.

That spot.

That mark.

666.

Bain shivered all over, and he felt Dad shiver as well. It was true, it was all true, it was all going to come true. They had sworn to the true Beast, they had stayed faithful, and he had returned to lead them all. The victory would be theirs.

Outside the office, a few crows – not quite a murder's worth – flitted back and forth, or perched in the bare tree branches. Some stalked blackly along the roof. They watched the windows, and the parking lot, and the cars going by. They muttered to each other in hoarse squawks that were nothing like human speech, and nothing escaped their black and pitiless eyes.

* * *

The first step was going to be getting past the puppy.

Fallyn was working from Mr. Thorn's house. She had tunneled into her home machine and set several automated tasks running; her employers would probably be rather interested to know how much of her 'work' every day was done by scripts. But the time she gained was spent on the Projects, so it did all even out in the end.

She swapped a few files around, made certain that no name had been hung on the footage of Captain Neff depositing his car in long-term parking; very cleverly he had parked his car and then taken a taxi to three houses down from the Thorn estate, and walked along the back property lines. All of these houses were shut up for the winter, so no one was there to spot him.

She'd nearly had a heart attack when Mr. Thorn called for a taxi; then she watched fascinated as a crow landed on each surveillance camera, fanning them with tails or wings and blocking their view for just long enough. That sort of power – and he didn't even seem to be consciously guiding it. He just thought 'I should not be seen' and he was not. It was amazing. And by the time the data of a taxi coming here was logged, uploaded, transmitted, analyzed and reviewed – it would be much too late.

The puppy was sitting near her feet while she worked. It watched her with a stolid, somewhat unpuppy-ish gaze. Of course it was not just a puppy; it had been sent. She had always heard that the servants were adult dogs and not puppies, but maybe this was a test, to see how Mr. Thorn would work with such a small helper.

Maybe it was supposed to be cute and disarming. She would have to see if she could disarm it, instead.

She tried crumpling up a bit of paper and throwing it; the dog watched her throw it, tracking the arc of the paper with its eyes, but then turned back.

She went into the kitchen, and sliced up half of the lone remaining steak and put it on a plate for the puppy. It nosed at it, but then sat and stared at her. She let it outside and it did its business and then darted back through the door. She didn't quite dare lock it out. It might be able to get back in – they said that the dogs could appear anywhere, carrying out the master's will.

Well, there was one test she could carry out right now. She started to amble around the house, looking at the paintings and pictures and the blank spaces that had been paintings and pictures. The puppy padded along behind her. She wondered what sort of pictures were missing, and let her feet carry her up the steps to the second level, and the bedrooms. She kept her thoughts as light and innocent and flattering as she could as she came to Mr. Thorn's bedroom and touched the door handle.

A surprisingly loud growl from behind her. She decided not to go any further. Instead she strolled down the hallway and peeked into a few open rooms and then went back to the guestroom and sat at her computer and started annotating a brief history of the world, 1982 through 2015. The puppy sat and watched; its hackles were not up, but it wasn't relaxed. She would have to come up with other plans.

* * *

When the front doorbell rang, Fallyn looked through the peephole, and then asked in querulous Spanish just what the deliveryman was dropping off. Food, apparently; she signed the receipt he slid under the door but waited until the truck was out of sight before opening up.

The food was neatly boxed in cartons, and there was a crow sitting on the security camera; it flicked its tail and dropped a bit of dung onto the frozen ground, and she half-laughed as she lugged the cartons inside and put the cold goods away. More steaks. Plus dog food. She stopped short at starting to cook a meal, but she did notice that there was a lot of coffee. Someone must be planning to spend a lot of time awake.

When she got back to her computers, there were glimmers of activity, emails flying back and forth (she wasn't in this particular email chain, but she had a nice little visual program that showed account activity for the top executives). And as more and more emails bounced (people on vacation, people out of town, people starting their holiday drinking early) the volume of email got bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

It was just this sort of electronic flurry that had let her to investigate an urgent request for surveillance footage deletion, and that had led her to uncovering Alexander's death. This time there was something even bigger coming, rising up from the depths. Unstoppable.

She would have to go home sooner than she planned; she expected to get a call, demanding she get to work and damn the hour. Damn, indeed. She smiled, a sleek row of white teeth sliced through her face. It was a rather frightening smile, actually. Because now it had begun. For Mr. Thorn, and for her.

* * *

Neff had been chosen before he even knew it. On the battlefield, his was always the position that was never overrun or flooded out; off the field, he was the one who never got a sprained ankle or gigged for a messy uniform or even caught a cold.

There was a price to pay for this protection, and when he found out what it was he reached out with all eagerness to pay it. He'd always been fascinated by the Bible, by the idea of powerful beings who could make worlds, who saw all and judged all. By the story of the Outcast One, who waited to rule the world through his son. To be a part of it, to be a part of prophecy, what man would not give their soul to join in that crusade?

Well, Neff had given. And he would give again, if he had to.

He had not minded the long period of waiting in McBatts' office while Damien signed and signed and signed, and then asked for some food to be sent to the house, and then signed some more before heading home. They had talked as they were driven through the streets of Chicago. Damien had been fascinated by the way the cars and the people had changed, while the great landmarks stayed the same; but what he most enjoyed pointing out were the dried-out husks of Christmas trees piled on every corner.

"Discarded saviors," he had said. "How many children loved and adored their Christmas tree, until it gave up its presents? Then they cast it aside." A rumbling noise in the back of his throat. "Saviors should not be discarded so easily."

When they had returned to the Thorn estate, which looked sad and ragged even in the dark, the food had been waiting and Fallyn as well. They ate quickly and then retired to the guestroom, where she exerted herself to give Damien Thorn a two-hour crash course on Internet use, modern technology, and how to use both.

Damien was a quick student: he always had been. Fallyn was clearly besotted at the sheer, blinding competence of the man. He never forgot what someone said to him, he never made a mistake more than once, and within two hours he was, if not the master of all he surveyed, at least well on his way to claiming it.

Fallyn's phone rang at this point, and she put it on speaker and let them hear as someone ordered her to work, right now. She protested at the late hour, but gave in. She left behind the laptop, several more burner phones, and a list of useful people and their contact information. Medical people of dubious morality, identity launderers, smugglers: Damien had to redirect her to also give him names that were of more immediate use. Like a barber and a tailor, both of the best reputation.

Before she left, Damien told them both about his vision the night before. She was agog with interest, and promised to do her best to locate any man named John Smith who had died on December 25th in the United States.

She also insisted on slipping out the side door. "The longer they don't know that I'm on your side, the longer you have an ear in their camp," she pointed out, and that was hard to contradict.

Now it was just him and Damien alone, and it was very reminiscent of the Academy. How many afternoons had they spent in his office, discussing philosophy and destiny? Those had been the most golden times of his life, watching a boy grow into a man and take on his responsibilities. To be a part of that flowering was something worth dedicating your life to.

They reviewed history again, current rather than ancient. Damien was spellbound by footage of the World Trade Center falling; he watched it from several angles, expressing his amazement at such a spectacular expression of pure, unreasoning religious hatred. It was glorious, like the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It was great to live in a time with such accomplishments in it.

There were other events: stock market crashes, protests, tsunamis, fires, hurricanes, droughts, floods – the world was full of signs of destruction. What better time for one man to step forward and say, I will lead you from this Pit?

They stopped after a few hours, took some coffee, stretched their legs.

"I wish I could show you this place in better form," Damien said, gesturing at the walls with their empty holes where paintings should be. "I presume all of these are in storage."

"If not, I'm sure they will regret it," Neff said. There would be no way of hiding those sorts of thefts from Damien now.

Damien looked at a portrait of his uncle and aunt, fiddled with the corner of the frame with one finger. He sipped his coffee and asked, "What can you tell me about Fallyn White? Beside the obvious: brilliant, brave, devoted."

Neff put down his coffee with a frown. "She graduated from MIT. She's specialized in AI all her life and will chew your ear off about it if you let her."

"AI…?"

"Artificial intelligence. Truly intelligent machines, that can improve themselves to become even more intelligent. The next step in evolution after human beings, according to some people. Fallyn's a little bit infamous – in fact," he picked his coffee back up, "I can show you."

Fallyn had left the laptop set up with a 'tunnel' available; she assured them that they could use it to do searches that would be sent through her computers at home, and not revealed to the outside world. Neff searched for 'Fallyn White AI', clicked the Images tab, and leaned back to let Damien see.

Damien leaned forward with a glitter in his eye. It was Fallyn, younger and with longer hair, and she was punching a bearded fat man very hard in the face. Blood spurted from his nose in an arc, and she was snarling like she wanted to use her teeth next. In the background were some buildings, people holding signs and also sledgehammers, and several holding cameras.

Neff knew the story behind the photo. "This was at a lab in California. A bunch of fanatics decided to break in one weekend and trash the place to protest 'bringing the machine into God's realm.' Fallyn was there and lost her temper – went out to fight them. They shot her-"

"What?"

"Just grazes. She was acquitted of assault, because she could obviously say it was self-defense – they did have sledgehammers. But the photo went viral," Neff had to pause and explain what that meant, "and she was unemployable after that. Too much controversy. No reputable company wanted to hire her."

"So she was hired by Thorn Industries." Damien sounded curious, and Neff shrugged.

"Fallyn White says she's one of the top AI specialists in the world, and I believe her. She's not here to do data entry. You don't hire an atomic submarine commander to handle your rowboat. If she's working for Thorn Industries, then they have something big going on in AI."

Damien let his fingers play over the keys without pressing any of them. "And what would the Internet tell me about you, Captain?"

"Oh," he slumped a little bit in his seat, "just an average retired military man with an outsized pension, who made a lot of lucky investments. Has a nice house, and a nice car, and nice vacation trips. A boring man, really; nothing controversial or outstanding about him.

"I was called to a Cause, and I devoted my life to it. Then it all changed."

"You used to be close to Paul Buher…" Damien let the statement trail off into what was not quite a question.

"Used to be. When you were struck down, he was the first to insist that we wait to see if you would be healed. But he was also the first to make certain that the people around him were loyal to him, and not you. And when Alexander was discovered, and proved to be someone who could be manipulated, he was fanatical in his devotion to him. I was the old guard. I just faded away.

"But I wonder now – should I have put up more of a fight? I know that others did. They tried to see you, or they tried to resist Buher's control, and they died. It felt safer to hang back, to save myself."

"Daniel. You were right. I am back and everything is going to happen as it is written. I swear." Damien could not be disbelieved, not when he talked in that tone, with that gleam to his eyes. "I swear."


	6. Putting On The Ritz

_And the Beast did walk to and fro upon the Earth, and many marveled and were afraid, though they knew him not._

* * *

Claude Bauxtelles worked in the most exclusive and elegantly furnished salon in Chicago, even though he had never seen it. He stayed in the center of the country, rather than moving to New York or Los Angeles where his talents would definitely be in demand, so as to be equidistant for his clients who had to fly from both coasts to see him.

They did fly, from both coasts and from around the world. Claude's very personal, very unique services were worth the trip.

Today was New Years' Eve, and people would be getting ready for parties. It was going to be a busy day - hopefully. Claude was a little perturbed when he climbed out of his cab, tapped his way to his front door with his cane, and was told by his receptionist Aura that his first appointment was a no-show.

"There's another gentlemen here, though. A Mister Thorn. He hasn't been here before and he doesn't have an appointment, but…"

Aura had an uncanny eye for choosing what clients should be sent to the head of the line. Claude ducked nimbly into the back, moving with ease here on his home territory. The chair and its tools would already be ready – that was also Aura's job – so he had nothing to do but to put aside his dark glasses, wrap a silk blindfold carefully over his sightless eyes, and go to meet his client.

"Good morning, Mister Thorn," he said, moving unerringly to the chair and resting his fingertips on the top edge, brushing the client's shoulder. Just six foot, he quickly calculated as he went on. "I am delighted to have you here. For everyone who is here for the first time, I must learn their face and their hair, the shape of their head. So please, sit still…"

His clean-washed hands rose along the client's neck – a beard, not too thick, not too long, but definitely in need of a trim – and then softly, gently explored his hairline, the set of his ears with their distinctive earlobes, his forehead with a fine asymmetrical line across it, the weight and wave of his hair-

"Ah!" Claude said, flinching. "But I know you!"

"Oh?"

Claude spoke a little faster as his hands just brushed through the man's hair, confirming what he already knew. "But yes, sir. You have a mansion on the North Shore, I was paid handsomely to visit and cut your hair, twice a year."

"Did we speak?"

Claude's hands faltered. "No? No, we did not. The man who hired me, he said you were ill."

"Well I'm much better now." Claude could feel Mr. Thorn smile through his fingers, the muscles shifting over his face. "So if you could, please: just a trim."

Claude was quick with the scissors and comb. As he worked he filled the client's ears with the story of how blind barbers had coiffed the crowned heads of Europe. How it was an old and august tradition, rarely seen in America but well appreciated by those with the discernment to only want the very best. As he spoke his fingers measured, carefully guiding the tiny scissors as he trimmed, feeling how the hair would shift with every snip. Cutting hair by eye was a game for illusionists: cutting it by feel was the work of a true magician. He could imagine his gold-washed instruments gleaming in the gold-trimmed mirrors, even if he had never seen them; the whole thing was as much a performance as it was workmanship. Mr. Thorn hummed appreciatively at the right spots in his dialogue, said that the haircut was splendid, and tipped generously. In cash.

"Was that Damien Thorn?" asked Aura after the man had left. "Really?"

"Really, why really?" Claude listened, a little aghast, and discovered that he had just had the equivalent of American royalty under his hands, after all.

* * *

Armed with a new haircut, new shoes and a new gray suit (the other suits and his own outdated clothing were being delivered to the house by the extremely obliging tailor), Damien Thorn walked through the Lincoln Park district, looking for somewhere to eat. All the restaurants he remembered had changed or closed, but he'd seen several new ones from the taxi window that looked promising. He had more appointments today, and he saw no reason not to indulge himself first.

Wherever he went, people noticed him. Again and again he saw people pause and look at him, raise their phones and take his picture, even spin around backwards and take pictures of themselves with him in the background. It was not every person, mind you: just the observant ones, the sensitive ones. And there were others who saw him and shuddered, turned away, stepped aside.

Either reaction was fine with him. What mattered was there be plenty of evidence of himself, Damien Thorn, up and around in the world looking perfectly healthy. Navigating the streets with no confusion or infirmity. He knew that Thorn Corporation was probably looking for signs of his presence. Well, let them look. Let them see.

He chose a small restaurant, and even though he had no reservation, the host gave him a seat at the center of the room. The food was delicious, the wine perfectly matched to it, and along with the bill he got the host's personal cell phone number.

He would take a taxi to his next task, but before he called one he paused in front of a movie theater marquee, reading the posters. He chuckled to himself; perhaps one of the people walking by would get a picture of him standing there, with the words glowing above him: "THE FORCE AWAKENS."

Now there was a sign for you.

* * *

Sherrie was bored.

A job at the DMV was supposed to be easy, that's what her mother had said. But people were just so slow, and so stupid, and she had to stand all the time, and she wasn't even supposed to text or anything while she was working! It was so unfair.

She was just back from lunch, and angry that she hadn't had time to step outside and grab a cigarette. She opened up her line and pushed the button to show the next number, and an old guy who was about to sit down instead came over. Huh. He must have just gotten here. Lucky.

"Good afternoon," he said and smiled, and Sherrie couldn't help but smile back. That smile was as warm and cozy as a blanket, and it felt like it was wrapping around her from head to toe. She stared up into his blue eyes and just …

He tapped a sheet of paper on the counter in front of her, and she jumped a little and then picked it up to read, blushing. She didn't blush. Not ever. Why was she blushing?

It was an application for a license renewal, and everything was filled out very neatly. That was such a relief, so many people were slobs, but not this – Damien Thorn.

"Damien Thorn," she said, and then let her eyes roll back up to his face.

He was still smiling. "Damien Thorn. Here's my identification."

He had a copy of his birth certificate – it was notarized, but it was still a copy. A copy of an old driver's license. And he had a bank statement.

There were a lot of zeros on that bank statement.

She hesitated, biting her lip. He saw her bite her lip and raised one eyebrow, and she blushed again. This was insane. This guy was old enough to be her grandfather, for Christ's sake. But he just … he just had It. The same It that really famous people had, and she supposed he was really famous. She remembered the articles that popped up every few years – 'Millionaire Still In Coma,' and all the awful stuff about him being stabbed by some cult guy in England.

He didn't have his original license, and it had expired years ago anyway. He should take a written test, probably a road test too. Those were the rules. And Sherrie knew that she should call and ask a supervisor to take over, but … but… she really didn't want to disappoint Mr. Thorn. Even though she'd just met him, she already wanted to make him happy. To make him smile again.

"OK!" she chirped. It was only a matter of ticking a box here and a box there, and now the system was happy. Really, nobody was being hurt by giving him the license today instead of making him go do stupid tests, were they? She was only trying to help. "If you could just stand against the backdrop there…"

One of the other girls came over as she was taking the photo, but Sherrie shooed her away before she started asking questions. He passed the vision test no problem, and paid the fee in cash. Sherrie punched the buttons and sent his information over to the license-making machine.

"Here you go, Mister Thorn," she said, handing him the card; it was still warm around the edges.

"Thank you, Sherrie," he said, and she tingled. He'd read her name tag! Before he could turn away, she blurted, "Um, are you really – THE Damien Thorn?"

He held up the driver's license he had been about to put in his wallet – his well-stuffed wallet, Sherrie noticed. "The one and only," he said, and left.

She put her head down for a moment, breathing deeply. Damien Thorn, that was really Damien Thorn. He must have woken up from his coma, like that guy in 'The Dead Zone.' And she'd met him, for real.

She really wanted to tell the other girls about it, but instead she had to help the next person in line. Damnit. She was pissed off for the next hour and she didn't even care; in fact she sort of enjoyed taking it out on her customers. But she perked up when someone she knew came into her line. Layla chattered constantly while she was getting her license renewed, and she mentioned that she'd gotten a picture of "that old guy who was talking to you." Sherrie knew that Layla couldn't take a picture without uploading it, so after the license was done she closed her line for a bathroom break.

In the bathroom stall, she looked both ways before pulling out her phone – and then giggled at how dumb that was. She wasn't supposed to be on the Internet at work, but so what? She was still giggling as she opened Layla's Facebook, and scrolled through her latest pictures. That one, that was him: unmistakable.

She added the tag "Damien Thorn." And giggled.

* * *

Paul Buher was King of the World – or that's how he liked to think of himself. Strictly speaking he was more the Voice of the King; the person who could wheedle Alexander into doing what was necessary with the best success. That was enough to let him keep his place. CEO of Thorn Corporation, the most powerful company in the world – even if most of the world was ignorant of that. The left hand of the reborn Antichrist.

But now Alexander Thorn was dead.

He was dead and Damien Thorn was a vegetable, rotting away on his estate. Paul could have sent someone to check, but why bother? The man hadn't changed in decades, except to age and wither. And there was the matter of his power, which could still come roaring out in fits and spurts. There was no need to guard the Thorn Estate against burglars; Damien's power would kill them without him seeming to notice. Which was why Paul had not visited in a long, long time.

Damien Thorn was radioactive waste; best handled at a distance by others. Hopefully he would continue to decay as time went on, and then pass into his grave, unremarked-on.

If only Alexander hadn't been sterile! They had tried over and over again to get a child of him, but it hadn't happened. Paul was going to have to decide if he dared produce a baby at random, and say that it was the son of Alexander…

No, he decided. It was better to keep Alexander's fate a secret as long as possible. He had a network of people loyal to him, and killers among them. He would just pick out someone, some target of interest, and have them killed in a spectacular fashion. After that death he would cluck his tongue and speak darkly of the dangers of opposing the will of the Fallen Angel. Let people think that he still had a direct line to Hell, and a supernatural way to dispatch people there.

Thermite. Thermite would be an interesting way to kill someone, wouldn't it? Burn them alive. He imagined the screams, the smoke, the smell …

For now though, it was New Year's Eve, and Paul had been celebrating since yesterday. The drugs had flowed like water, and the bodies had flowed like drugs: sleek shaved bodies, lithe and young, the way he liked them. An endless blur of arms, mouths, bodies, genitals: and he popped a Viagra whenever he felt his interest flagging. He lay on satin cushions, surrounded by platters of his favorite delicacies, nestled in a heap of people that he could do anything he wanted to, anything! He woke and reveled, and slept, and then woke again; it was a blur of pleasure that would not stop for at least another day. Maybe two.

Right now he was leisurely baiting two of his playthings with a cherry, still hanging from its stem; he twitched it one way and then the other, and their wet red mouths followed it obediently. Soon he would balance that cherry right on the point of his passion, and set them both to nibbling and licking … but he was interrupted.

He was – interrupted!

Paul Buher was not to be interrupted during his celebrations. Not for anything, not for anyone, not for the end of the whole damned world!

The man who had come into his retreat was terrified: teeth bared, body tense. He held up a smartphone as though it was a shield between them, and before the naked Paul could rise from his cushions and kick those teeth in, he looked at the phone and saw a picture of a man.

A white-haired man.

A man he knew. A man who knew him…

Paul fell back into the cushions; the cherry dropped from his nerveless fingers, and he paid no attention to his playthings as they scrambled after it.

Because the whole damned world had just ended.


	7. Revelations

Captain Neff was exhausted.

He had been working the little notebook full of names that Damien had given him and he had annotated. With that, and with Fallyn's burner phone, he had been looking up people, and calling them. It was harder work than he expected, to recall faces to go with the names, try to think of what connections they had, when they had last spoken in person. He kept everything casual. Just saying hello, feeling them out, seeing how things were going. Neff had been asked to not be explicit, so he just dropped hints: be prepared for a sign. A call.

He'd had to stop to get a delivery at the front door; it was a tailor's assistant with suits for Damien. Neff had laid them across the table in the coatroom, because when he tried to go upstairs Damien's puppy would just – stare at him. He thought it best not to test that beast.

The suits meant that Damien was all right. He had to keep reminding himself that of course he was all right, that he was invulnerable. Damien Thorn had to go out by himself, to be seen, to show the world that he could go around without a helper at his elbow. But there was a tension running through Neff that wouldn't break until Damien was back in his sight.

When Damien returned he was glowing with good cheer. He had met with the attorneys that the McBatts had recommended and had found them informed, disciplined, and hungry for blood. There would be blood aplenty here: a leeching of all the impurities that had clotted the veins of Thorn Industries. New blood, the blackest, richest blood imaginable, would be rushing in. Pure blood, chosen by Damien. His people. His company. His hour. The surgery was already beginning, the legal team laying out the paperwork like scalpels.

Neff had looked over the food that had been delivered, and picked out the simplest things: steaks and potatoes. He didn't even know how to cook chanterelles – whatever they were. He cooked for two, falling into the role of servant with relief. This was his place, what he was meant to do. As well he set out a bowl of dog food on the floor, and the puppy condescended to eat from it.

Damien insisted on eating in the main dining room, its rich wood trim and fine furnishings somewhat tarnished by the dust and the blank spots on the walls where paintings had been. While Neff was setting up, he vanished on some errand. Damien's place was at the head of the table, of course, and Neff would sit at his left hand.

When Damien returned, he was holding two wine glasses in one hand, and a small cage in the other. The cage was actually some sort of metal brace that held a bottle of wine at an angle just shy of horizontal.

"My wine cellar has been stripped to the bare walls," he said, his eyes brooding. "And I suppose they just drank it all, not giving it a chance to – anyway, they missed a bottle. It was particularly fine when I put it down," he put the glasses down on the table, then carefully brushed the dust from the label with a napkin and raised one eyebrow, "…well. This isn't the bottle I thought it was. It should be even finer than I guessed. Could you just hand me a candle from the sideboard there? The matches and the corkscrew should be in the drawer under them."

Neff did, and watched fascinated as Damien delicately uncorked the bottle, being careful to disturb it the absolute minimum. He held the bottle to the candlelight in its cage as he poured a minute portion into his glass, watching the fluid flow through the neck.

He sipped, and his eyes glittered in the candlelight. "This has aged well – although I don't know how long it will last with the bottle open. Well," he smiled at Neff, "I am glad to share it in such good company."

The steaks were medium rare, the potatoes soft with butter and the wine – Neff took a sip and then just sat there, trying to process what it tasted like. He wanted to say something impressive and wise, but really, wine just was not his thing. At all. He knew that you were supposed to talk about bouquets and aftertastes and overtones, but he could only say that it was delicious as he sipped it, even more delicious as he swallowed, and it left a pleasant tingling to his mouth that went wonderfully with the wet red flavor of the beef.

Damien could describe this wine perfectly of course, but that was part of his education. Part of what he had to be. For right now though, it was fine just to sit and eat with him, and know that he was well.

When both their glasses were empty, Damien refilled them, and proposed a toast.

"To 2016," he said, and Neff echoed it and clinked their glasses together.

"2016," and his numerically inclined mind spotted it. "Two plus one is three –and then six. Three sixes."

Damien nodded in solemn agreement, then put his wineglass down and fiddled with the stem. He pushed his empty plate aside. "It's going to be a very busy year."

Neff leaned back in his chair, replete, savoring the taste of the second glass of wine – subtly different from the first glass. The taste of something darker seemed to mingle in the red liquid now. "That's to be expected."

"Nothing is going to be as it is expected."

While Neff had been calling people, while he had been waiting on hold and waiting for people to pick up or just pacing and waiting for people to call back, he had amused himself by winding up some of the clocks that were sitting mute on shelves and walls in the house. He'd wound the one in the dining room, a beautiful machine of mahogany and gold, and he could hear it ticking as Damien went on.

"When I prayed to my Father, and he told me the Nazarene's fate, he gave me a task. A task that I will carry out with all haste and every possible force."

Neff straightened, his heart starting to beat a little harder in his chest.

"My Father told me to raise him an army. To release him from the Pit where he was so cruelly cast down. To go with him, to fight with him, as he rises from the depths to the heights, and takes the battle to Heaven itself."

Tick tick tick.

"And I know that he will win that battle."

Tick tick tick.

"God is dead."

The clock did not tick, for an endless moment, and then it did. Tick tick tick, as though nothing had changed. But of course, everything had just changed. It was – staggering, it was unbelievable. If anyone but Damien had said it – but Damien had said it. And he believed. And he being who he was, to look on him and hear him say those words was to believe as well.

God is dead. But – that meant that everything that related to the role of God in the final conflict, it could be – discarded? Reinterpreted? What was the fate of Heaven, of the angels – what was happening to the world? Was it slowly unraveling without its Creator to hold it together? Everything that happened from the point of that death, was it random chance or some residual power or could the world actually run itself without God in charge.

And what if – his mind flung itself into the new possibilities – what if Satan could enter Heaven, and take it, and rule it? What would the world be like, with the fallen Angel on the throne? What sort of miracles would be showered on the Earth then?

Neff really needed to start writing this all down.

They both sat silent for a while, watching the candle flame gutter, lost in their own thoughts. Damien frowned as he held the wine bottle up to the candle again. "Nothing left in here but sediment … Daniel, I want you to move into the Thorn Estate."

Neff was still processing the news, and it took him a moment to react. "What?"

"I am raising an army. I will need generals. Go home, Daniel. Get your house sealed up for the winter, pack whatever you need. If you'd take a tour of my library first I'd appreciate it, there are some books missing that you might be able to bring with you. I want you at my side when we enter that battlefield."

And Neff heard, and he obeyed, of course. He would look at the library, let his dinner settle, and be on his way by midnight. And he would enter the New Year with a heart full of fire, knowing that all would be changed. And that he would be a part of that change.

He whispered to himself, "He is my fortress, I will not be shaken." But the fortress he pictured was not a golden palace floating in the heavens: it was black as night, as endless as death. And it was everywhere underfoot, the root of all things. Hell itself, waiting to rise.

* * *

At the same hour that Damien and Neff talked and relaxed, Paul Buher was meeting with selected people from Thorn Industries, and that meeting was not at all relaxed.

Paul had been handsome when he was young, and he was still charming in a grandfatherly way when he wanted to be. But right now he looked more like a rabid dog than a kindly old man. His hair stood up in tufts, his blue eyes were staring and red-rimmed, and he hadn't had time to bathe; he stank of his pleasures, and of fear.

The only compensation was seeing how he had interrupted everyone else's revels as well. Grant had traces of crimson under his fingernails that was probably not paint or lipstick; King's wrists were marked with strangely patterned abrasions; Lethem's hands kept twitching as he reached for something that was not there. The rest of the board members, men and women, looked just as frazzled.

Paul was furious, terrified, humiliated: he could feel the reins of power not just slipping from his fingers, but wrapping around his own neck. And he had no one to blame but himself, he knew that.

He had been the one who ran Thorn Industries while Damien was at Oxford, growing from a boy to a man. He had worked at his side for the seven years he had run the corporation. And when Damien had taken the position of Ambassador to England, he had had every intention of following Damien's orders and aiding him in running the company from overseas – in contravention of several laws, of course. As though either of them had ever cared about laws.

But then Damien had been struck down. Not died; fallen into a babbling trance that he couldn't be roused from. He had failed, the Antichrist had failed, and Paul had felt like he had failed with him. And in his determination to prove himself, to prove he would not fail, he had pruned away anyone who might be more loyal to Damien than to him. He had seen how the company's charitable efforts could be instead directed purely to profits, and had done that directing. Every month, every year, Damien's orders were fainter and fainter in his memories.

And once they had Delia, once Alexander was born, it seemed as though the profits would never end. There was no limit to what a ruthless corporation could achieve, especially one with a (almost) foolproof method of traceless assassination and disaster-causing. Until now.

If Damien had recovered and found Thorn Industries a globally known superpower, welding the hearts of all the people into one throbbing center of devotion and obedience, Paul could have stepped aside and received rewards beyond comprehension. He could have stood at the left hand of the Beast and watched him harvest the world for his kingdom. But the company had strayed far, very far, from the path that Damien had laid out. And he had guided that straying. He had traded away a matchless destiny for money, for pleasures that now seemed like pale phantasms, for, (he hated himself for admitting it, but it was true), for a pseudo-Antichrist that he could feel superior towards, instead of worshipful…

There was no time to inventory how thoroughly he had tied the noose around his own neck. His only chance, their only chance, was to cut their way free. If they could just strip Damien of his allies, they could isolate him. Come up with a story about an imposter, a fraudster trying to steal Damien's identity. What he had started they could undo. Say the paperwork was forgeries, find (or make) a corpse and use it to prove that Damien was dead. There had to be some way to distract him, drug him, poison him, end his life…

The first, obvious point of attack was the McBatts office. It was there that a photo had been snapped of two men: Damien, unmistakable even after all these years, his coat the same as the one he had worn when he paraded around Chicago today. And an older man, with grey hair peeking out from under a knit hat. That man they hadn't identified yet. The resolution of the photos they had was just too low, and by blind bad luck there had been birds obscuring half the cameras in the area.

But it seemed that nobody could get to the McBatts office. They had sent out two cars, and both times the drivers had become lost, wandering the streets, their GPS sending them in circles.

"Then park the damned car and walk there!" Paul had seethed, and Grant had snapped back that they'd tried that. The men they'd sent had phoned when they were in sight of the front door, and they had not been seen since. No footage of them entering the offices. No footage of them leaving the area. They were just gone.

The door opened, letting in a gust of fresh air to stir the staleness. Multiple eyes looked at the twitching young man with a laptop clutched to his chest like a life preserver.

"Mr. Buher, you asked me to come in if we found the man with – him?" They were evading the use of Damien's name. Demons were summoned by name, after all.

Paul rose and swept the photos and papers aside with his forearm. Those dammed account-freezing orders, every one signed with a familiar bold signature, fluttered to the floor. "Show me!"

The twitching man – some nobody from the IT department - set down his laptop and turned it so they could all see. "I couldn't find any match for the man in the hat on our Must Follow list, so I reviewed the list by hand. One of the search records was damaged."

"Damaged how?" Paul demanded.

"Well, it could just be a random error-"

"Or sabotage." That from Grant, twirling his black moustache between his fingers like a cartoon villain.

"Maybe sabotage. Anyway, the damage meant that there would never be a match if you were looking for this man." A few clicks on the keys, and the blurry, enlarged surveillance photo was overlaid with another, sharper one. Taken at a gas station, probably, with the camera inside the pump. The face was lean and lined and familiar.

"Neff. Neff, you cocksucker, you traitor!" Paul's teeth were bared so hard his speech was blurred. "You swore. You swore the oath, you gave your allegiance to me! Oh you filthy fucking shit-"

Paul snapped his head up so fast that spittle flew from his upper lip. "You. Find out who did whatever it was that made the search fail." He'd never been able to root all of the old followers out of the IT department, there were still a few experts too priceless to replace. If one of them was responsible, he'd see them flayed alive. "Where is Neff now?"

He was on the road back to Wisconsin, apparently. Now that they knew who they were looking for, he could be manually traced, without using the fancy programs that had failed to find him before. Neff was miles and miles away from Damien, away from his protection.

Paul shot down the tiny voice in his head that told him Damien could send his powers across oceans and continents. He might have only been awake a day or two, how would he know all there was to know about how the world worked now? He could still be weak, confused, fumbling. There was still time to-

"Find someone who can intercept Neff. I don't want him getting home alive. And keep reviewing the surveillance footage, see if there's anyone he met with today who might be aligned with the Watch."

The nobody left and Paul leaned back in his chair. He had made the gesture to draw first blood, and it heartened him. "Now. We need to plan for what we will do once – he - is all alone in the world…"

* * *

He was on Route 12 through Wisconsin and making good time home when he saw the police car lights flicker alive in his rear-view mirror. Neff put on his hazards and pulled over. It was New Years Eve after all, it made sense that there would be more police on the roads than usual.

The officer who came to his window was tall, broad and very dark, and he spoke with a pronounced Chicago accent. "License an' registration, please."

Neff handed them over and then sat, hands on the steering wheel, staring up at the officer with his blandest expression in place. He said nothing.

The officer looked at the license, and then at him. He turned to go back to his cruiser, and then paused and came back, staring at Neff's face as though he was looking for something.

It was very quiet by the side of the road, and very dark. The silence was broken by a single harsh croak out of the trees. A bird, maybe - but at this hour?

"Sir," the police officer blinked and shook his head as though dazed, "were you aware that you were going the speed limit?"

Neff carefully kept his bland expression in place. "Yes, Officer."

"Exactly at the speed limit?"

Neff blinked. "Yes."

The officer nodded, slowly. "Well, you – you keep on doin' that. Have a nice day." He thrust the papers back into Neff's hands – actually he just thrust them blindly in his direction, and Neff had to reach out and grab them before they fell – and then lumbered back towards his vehicle.

Neff leaned out the window and turned his head, watching the officer as he sat in his cruiser and then just - sat there.

Another croaking noise, from the darkness. A fluttering.

Whatever was about to happen, Neff didn't think he needed to witness. Not this time. He started his car and pulled out, watching the blue-and-red lights dancing over the landscape around him, seeing them get smaller and smaller and smaller in his rear view mirror – and then they were gone.

In the police cruiser, Officer John Brownfield was thinking and it was hard, hard to think. He knew that he'd just missed something, made some sort of mistake, but he wasn't quite sure what it was. He had overlooked something. Some step, some process. He had his orders, and he knew he had to carry them out, that it was so very important to carry them out, but he'd forgotten something that he was supposed to do.

He'd found the car, that was right.

He'd pulled it over, and then he was supposed to …he was supposed to …

Brownfield's lips were pulled back in a terrifying grimace, as he fought his own mind, trying to remember what he had forgotten. He didn't even notice how the police lights slid over something black that had just landed on his hood. Lights glowing in a black bird's eye. A single tap of a beak against the glass.

As though he was lifting a hundred-pound weight, he slowly reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a packet of white crystals. He stared at it, forehead creased with tension and anguish. This was the – this was the crack, that was it, it was drugs and he was supposed to put them into Neff's car, right after he pulled out his service revolver (like this) and pointed at Neff's (his) head, and pulled the tr-

The lights kept flickering through the night, slower and dimmer as the car's batteries ran down. None of the drivers who passed, drunk or sober, slowed down. It was morning before someone found Officer John Brownfield, well out of his jurisdiction and dead as a doornail, with his gun in one hand and a bag of crack in the other.

* * *

It was the night of the New Year, and around the world billions of people celebrated. Some celebrated with the latest in electronic gadgets and fripperies, and some carried out rites that were thousands of years old. But among those billions were some who paid little attention to the calendar, who spent the night in the pursuit of their own personal interests and hobbies. Such as astronomy.

It was on that night – December 31st, 2015 – that people started to mention, and then talk, and then finally obsess on certain Internet boards about having trouble tracking certain stars. Brown dwarf stars, not visible to the naked eye. It was probably a coincidence that those stars were among those closest to the Earth.

But people were having a hard time locating them. It was as though the stars were being occluded by something.

Or as though the stars were going out.

But of course that was ridiculous.


	8. The Bell Tolls

If there ever was a man who could be described as exultantly eating a bowl of oatmeal, it was Damien Thorn on the morning of New Years Day, 2016. He had woken with a feeling of supreme vigor and aliveness, as though he could run twice around the world without stopping to catch his breath. Everything was lining up, everything was settling into place, and once he had his grip he was going to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze his enemies until their life ran out over his fingers.

Then he would squeeze the Earth, and mold it as his Father wished it.

Oatmeal was certainly preferable to what they called 'English' muffins now; they were sickening sweet to his palate, and he discarded them for the ravens after only a few bites. He wondered how many of his other favorite foods had been changed. No matter. He would change them back, as he willed.

Today was a holiday – for him, most certainly an unholy day - and he would spend it making phone calls. He called Neff, who said to expect him on Monday; he had a lot of books to pack. That was fine.

Damien opened up his notebook, and ran a finger down the first page. Here was a name not crossed out: Reverend Graham Ross, now Bishop Graham Ross. He was in England, he should be awake.

He was awake. Awake and weeping, as he realized who he was speaking to, who had returned. Again and again he cried out Damien's name, and Damien held the phone close to his ear and made soothing noises. The puppy danced around his feet, apparently thinking those noises were for him, and Damien chuckled at the dog and at the man.

"Spread the word," he invited the Bishop. "Tell the faithful that I am come again." And wouldn't that put the cat among the pigeons! He gloated at the thought of that word rippling outwards, leaving joy and terror behind it in equal measure. Those whose faith had been solid and true, those who had never chosen Mammon over him: those were the people he would call back to his service.

He paced from room to room as he made the next phone call, and the next. He had no idea if the house was bugged – he didn't think so, because he hadn't seen any cameras inside. Only outside. Just to be certain, he concentrated for an instant on the idea of bugs, spies, tiny electronic gadgets hidden about him, and then he imagined them dead. Silent, crushed, muted. The phone in his hand flashed ripples of color across the screen and promptly stopped working.

Hmm.

He switched cellphones, and made some more calls. As the day went on he started to get some less positive reactions. People who hung up without even doing him the courtesy of saying hello; people who said they'd been warned about an imposter. It was an obvious tactic for Buher to take, to try and discredit him. Some believed after hearing his voice, but others were only going to be convinced by seeing him in the flesh.

Well. That would come soon enough.

He updated his notebook as he went: Mr. Choi (a plus sign), Mrs. Elance (hung up), Mr. Lebber (doubting), Mr. Grabow (a plus but very ill), Mrs. Williams (another plus) and so on.

At lunch, he tried one of the microwave dinners that Pepita had stocked for him. That was also offered up to the ravens in short order, and even they looked unenthused. To think he had been living for decades on this swill. He made himself a sandwich instead. Not the best ham, certainly not the mustard that he'd choose, but adequate for now.

After he ate, he sat down in the guestroom and idly typed 'Bible Dead Sea Scrolls' into the laptop. The result of that search was a flood of incredibly high-resolution photos, thousands upon thousands of words of analysis. It was amazingly distracting, but Damien soldiered on, calling and reading. He alternated his Bible readings with Fallyn's history of the last thirty years, and marveled at the congruencies between them.

When he stopped for a break, his cellphone rang. Puzzled, he answered and heard Fallyn's breathy voice. "Mr. Thorn, do you know who the NSA are?"

"The National Security Agency, yes? Spies."

"Right. Spies with a lot of power. They've just put a priority request to have all your communications monitored, analyzed, and compiled for review."

He raised one eyebrow. "And you know this how?"

A sniff. "Because we wrote the program that's going to be handling that request, and it called me and told me what was happening. Well, texted me would be more accurate … Anyway, I would recommend being as opaque as possible when you're talking to people. I'll arrange for the program to give ambiguous results. All recordings of your conversations will suffer from dataloss. And you also asked about a Mr. Smith?"

He gave a little mental shake as she jumped from subject to subject. She meant the Nazarene. "Yes?"

"No luck so far. But I do have some information on Mr. Alexander. Do you have a pen and paper?"

He did of course. "Yes."

"400 Rainbow Station Road, Windsor, Connecticut. A burial, in private, this Sunday at one. For him and his sister. Unconsecrated ground, of course."

Damien felt heat building behind his eyes. They had raised his children to be debauched useless creatures, and now they were going to bury them in secret, without even giving their father an invitation to the funeral. He felt fury, only fury, and certainly not grief. No, not grief. Never.

* * *

Nurse Morrison was not looking forward to giving Mr. Grabow his sponge bath. He was sick and miserable, all of the time: he was here in the hospital to die and he knew it, his body failing more every week, and none of his relatives ever came to visit. He took out his pain on everyone who came in contact with him, and dealing with him was usually the worst part of her day.

But today Mr. Grabow was almost polite. He still winced in pain as he moved, but he did move when asked instead of going limp or thrashing around like a strangled octopus or shitting into the towels on purpose. And after he was dried off, and tucked back between his sheets, he said in a weak voice, "Nurse?"

"Yes?" she answered, wary of more abuse.

"I'm sorry I don't know you. These eyes, you know." He gestured to his face, his brown eyes cloudy with cataracts. "I wanted to thank you – all of you, for everything you've done."

"Really?" Her voice came out suspicious, but he didn't seem to notice.

"Yes. I know that I've been a bastard to deal with, but I heard some very good news today." He rolled his head and stared towards the phone beside his bed, then looked back at Morrison. "News that was worth staying alive for. So – thank you."

"Oh." She bundled up the used towels, and said, "Well…you're welcome," and left.

And that night Mr. Grabow left as well, with a smile on his face and Damien's name on his lips. The Antichrist had risen, and his children and grandchildren would live to see his reign, even if he, himself, would not.

It was a pleasure to die.

* * *

Being the head of an international corporation, or really any sort of large organization, required a certain amount of acting. Pretending to be interested in whatever premiere or event you were attending; listening attentively while someone pitched the same plan you'd heard a hundred times to you; invoking anger you did not feel to motivate people to do their jobs. Damien knew all these little roles. Today, he'd have a chance to try out some new ones.

It was Saturday morning, and he was meeting with his attorneys: representatives from the highly recommended national firm of Stephens, Scott, Taylor and Fitzpatrick. For a project of this magnitude, there were no weekends. Bain McBatts had accompanied them to the house, and Damien had noticed with a little private glee that two ravens flapped heavily into the trees and landed there as Bain arrived. His watchers, loyally on duty. While he was getting everyone settled in the living room, and offering coffee around, his financial advisor pulled him aside and handed him a gold-tinted plastic card. DAMIEN THORN, read the name embossed on it.

"It's linked to the account that received the transfer from Switzerland," Bain explained, and Damien smiled at the card with appreciation. Keeping a little gold bullion out of the country and off the list of his official assets had been a good idea. He put the card away for safekeeping, and sat down to begin discussing matters. He had great plans, and they had great resources, and he knew within half an hour that they were going to do great things together.

One of their first requests was that he give them a tour of the house, so they could see how he had been living. They were going to record it, so Damien went to the trouble of changing into his old clothes. In worn slacks and a tattered sweater, he stood in his bedroom and acted out the role of Man Held Hostage By Unknown People (Who He Is About To Sue).

"Look here, here in these closets," he opened the doors and stepped back so that the menwith their clever hand-sized cameras could look inside. "No shoes! Not a shoe or a boot anywhere. No winter clothes at all. What if the house had caught on fire? I'd have been left standing outside in the snow, in my socks, waiting for help!"

He didn't like making himself look weak like this, but he had been weak and now he was strong with his Father's strength, so what matter what people thought? He also had another, disquieting thought: what if Thorn Industries turned around and said Damien Thorn had not been in a coma, but had been awake and aware – and had led them into doing various illegalities? He wouldn't put it past Paul Buher to try and dump all his errors into Damien's lap, then cut and run. So best to cut him off with the truth, as much truth as he could safely wield.

He showed them the kitchen (pointing out the boxes of oatmeal and stacks of TV dinners, plus the drawers of sharp knives where any fumbling hand could find them), the outside (the grounds shabby, the hedges unkempt, the mysterious cameras on his house), the living room bare of working televisions and current newspapers, the walls and libraries with the gaping, obvious holes where art and books should be, the emptied safes, and then the downstairs guest room.

"I don't know anything about this room. I never went in, I suppose the door was locked. It looks like someone was living in here, but-"

There was a click from the door to the outside. The doorknob turned, and everyone in the room turned as well, to stare at the tall black man who opened the door and stood there, gaping at them.

"Who the hell are – what?" The man – young man, not older than twenty-five – looked at them all. His gaze met Damien's and he took half a step back, as though to run.

Damien widened his eyes a fraction, lowered his head. None of the lawyers noticed – they were all staring in the same direction, their cameras pointing and seeming to stare as well – but Bain watched out of the corner of his eye as Damien set his will upon the intruder and his desire to flee crumpled like a piece of paper in flame. Instead the black man came a step or two closer into the room, staring at Damien like a stunned ox.

"Excuse me, but who are you and how did you get a key to that door?" Damien's voice was friendly, but also compelling. He came two steps forward and sat down on the couch, and as though mirroring him, the young man sat down in an easy chair. Out of nowhere the puppy that had been sleeping in the kitchen appeared, and snuggled close to Damien's ankles. The lawyers, Mr. Scott and Mrs. Fitzpatrick and the others, started to spread out and find seats – except for the ones who remained standing, filming.

No one paid any attention to them. All attention was on the stranger, and on the white-haired man talking to him.

"Uh, I'm Robert Prophet, and I live here. When I'm not visiting my mom. I mean, I mean I don't own this house, I'm just supposed to watch it. Well, watch the guy who lives here. Uh, is that you?"

Damien blinked, slowly. "Yes. Don't you recognize me?"

"Uh, well, you look different. I always saw you asleep, y'know man?"

"So," said Mr. Scott slowly, "you are not Will Maloney, the home health aide?"

"Huh? No, no, Will was the guy who got me this job though. I get to live here rent-free, got my games, got this boss TV, and all I have to do is call the number by the phone if the old guy – um, you, if you get sick."

"Call the number by the phone? Not 911?" Scott's voice was just a bit doubting.

"Oh no way, no way! I had to call that number, not 911."

"And just how often did you check on me?" Damien raised one grey eyebrow, and Robert seemed to wither, any lies he might be thinking of vanishing from his mouth.

"Well, I was supposed to only check while you were asleep, at night. I checked – sometimes. I mean, a bunch of times."

"A bunch of times." Damien's voice was quiet, quiet enough that he fancied he could hear the gears turning in his lawyers' heads. Leaving an invalid here in a situation where he could be seriously hurt or ill, and nobody would check on him? Well all right, Pepita would have found him first, but this man was supposed to be taking care of someone unable to help themselves! And where was Maloney?

"Look, I don't know nothing about a home health aide gig. I just watch the place. I mean, I don't even know who you are!" Robert pointed at Damien, who looked hurt for a millisecond.

"I'm Damien Thorn."

"Really? No shit?"

"Really." Damien put on his most helpful air. "Mr. Prophet, it seems that you've been put in a bad spot here. Whoever hired you didn't inform you of exactly what your responsibilities should be, which was very wrong of them. Now, as it happens I'm going to be needing this room back. However" – here he raised his hand and made calm-down motions to Robert, before he could get up – "however, under the circumstances, I don't think it's fair to just throw you out.

"How about I ask one of my people to find you a new place-"

Mr. Scott leaned over and murmured, "Conflict of interest, Mr. Thorn-"

"Just find him a place, a secure place, and take his testimony."

Mr. Scott shrugged elaborately, but rose and put a friendly hand onto Robert's arm, steering him into the kitchenette. Damien had every faith that he would have their wonderful new witness tucked away somewhere that Paul Buher would not find him, posthaste. What grand good luck – no of course it wasn't luck. It was his Father. Praise His name, praise His will, praise His power.

"Mr. McBatts," Damien said _sotto voice_. "I believe a locksmith is in order."

Bain's reply was equally quiet. "Already made a call, Mr. Thorn. He'll be here after lunch. I've also retained a private security firm to be on call, until you can get your own people in place."

He would want a certain kind of guard inside his walls; people who knew his true nature. Already his house was defended, but it would draw more attention than he wanted if intruders all died in mysterious accidents, or were mobbed by ravens. When a snippet of video could be seen around the world in hours if not minutes, it was best not be flamboyant.

Not yet, at least.

They finished their filming of the house and the taking of his testimony by the afternoon. "Gentlemen, ladies," he addressed them all. "I think we've done a lot of excellent work today. I'm looking forward to meeting with all of you here, on Monday, to prepare for the competency hearing."

"What about tomorrow?" That was Lisa Fitzpatrick, one of the senior partners, whose lined and placid face was a mask for an amazingly devious mind.

"That won't be possible, I'm afraid. I have somewhere else to be."

* * *

Senator Gene York stood in the wooded lot on Sunday morning, and tried to ignore the smell of hair dye hovering around his face. He was going to have to get it dyed back to its normal color tomorrow, and he hated it: hated that he had to disguise himself and fly here under an alias, hated that he couldn't lay his children to rest under their true names. But that was not his decision to make.

Too many people knew the true father of his adopted children. That Delia and Alexander York should truly be called Delia and Alexander Thorn. Their deaths would be a catastrophe that would echo around the world, if the wrong people found out. So now there was this secret funeral, attended only by a handful of the most faithful. Now there were carefully couched bits of information being released (a Tweet there, a photograph there) showing that 'his' children were alive. Now there was a story being prepared about a fictional trip, and later a move overseas.

The truth was that the limp meat in the two coffins before him was all that was left of his hopes and dreams. The hopes and dreams of so many.

He watched as the 'priest' (only a skilled eye would notice the leather thong around one wrist, the pierced earlobe, and the other tiny signs that he was no official of the Christian Church) mouthed empty words. The people before him murmured to each other, but were mostly silent. The gravediggers were waiting out of sight to fill the graves with concrete once the ceremony was over; the drone of the mixer rumbled in the distance. They wouldn't even have tombstones.

He leaned his head back, as though looking to the sky for answers. Fools, fools, there were no answers there, they were all here, on Earth! But Gene did not feel any answers.

His son was dead. His son, but not his son. Alexander, the Antichrist reborn - he was dead. His sister Delia had died with him, in a mysterious car crash. They had been found the night of Christmas Day – most of them, that is.

The faithful had waited to see if Alexander would rise, if either of them would; but instead they only rotted.

Gene York was supposed to have been President York by now. It had been promised: him as President, then stepping aside for Alexander to become World Leader. Alexander was going to give that to him, and instead he had frittered his life and his power away and he was dead. He cursed to himself, silently. Everything seemed to be going wrong, with his life, with the world. Even this trip had been a nightmare; his flight had been delayed, his hotel was completely inadequate, and he'd left his cellphone behind by mistake.

The 'priest' glanced, and then stared, at someone who seemed to have just arrived behind Gene's left shoulder. The other mourners turned and looked as well, with expressions ranging from curiosity to fear. There was a long, awkward moment as everyone stood silent, as though waiting for some signal.

Out of the corner of his eye, Gene saw a man's hand making a single imperious wave. Go on, that wave seemed to say. Proceed with this farce.

Gene stood very, very still. Someone was behind him, he could hear them breathing. Breathing slowly, deeply, with a faint rumble at the end of every exhalation. It was the sound of a beast, breathing. He tried to trick himself into thinking it was Alexander, somehow returned: but Alexander had never sounded like that. He wheezed, from fat and smoke clotting his body, from lethargy and from indulgence in every vice. He wheezed like an asthmatic infant. Not like – this.

Gene flinched as a short, dark man came around his right side and took a picture with a professional-looking camera. Several pictures, of the service and of him. Then he stepped back, out of sight.

Slowly, fearfully, Gene turned and looked to see who was standing behind him.

He saw a man about sixty, with grey hair and a silvery beard and a serious black suit. Eyes like endless depths of ice, and a mouth set in a firm expression of somber attention.

"Senator York," the grey-haired man said, in a voice too soft to be heard by the other mourners. "My condolences on your loss."

"My –loss. Yes. Thank you for being here," he mumbled. Inside he was starting to feel afraid. The people here, they knew that he was Senator York, but how did this stranger find out? Who was he?

"It must be terrible to lose both your children at once. The only thing that could be worse, I think, would be for them never to have been born. Because at least you did have those years with them…"

The stranger's voice trailed off, and Gene leaned forward a little, almost involuntarily. That voice was just – mesmerizing. He wanted to listen to this man talk, and – and his voice was familiar.

Sometimes Alexander could sound like that, could have a voice that would snare your heart as tight as cold steel wire; but this stranger … this stranger with blue eyes …

… eyes as blue as Alexander's eyes …

No. Gene had leaned forward, now he backed away a step, and the man smiled. The drone of the elegy, the rumble of the mixer, seemed to recede into the distance, and his heartbeat thundered in his ears.

It was Damien Thorn. The eyes, the cheekbones, the shoulders – yes, it was him. Older than his photos, grey hair instead of brown, but still full of a vigor that seemed to make the air crackle around him.

But … but … Thorn was crippled, mindless. Dead in all but body, how else could Alexander have been born with the Mark? He hadn't been seen in public in decades. There was no possible way he could be here!

Mr. Thorn looked at Gene, and he felt that attention encircle him like some great black claw. It promised deep wounding and endless pain, and then it seemed to pull back. But he could feel it hovering, somewhere close. The promise of infinite suffering.

Thorn's words were more clipped now. "Did you really think you could hide them from me? My own children? And you do seem to have done a remarkably poor job of raising them."

Thorn's expression was touched with grief for an instant, and Gene could hear the camera whirring again. Then it stopped, and wrath boiled behind those cold eyes, boring into Gene's withering, cowering soul and finding it almost not worth the crushing.

Almost.

"I will remember how you have guided my own flesh and blood. All those who have been a part of that rearing and flowering, they shall know the shadow of my reaping soon enough." His eyes narrowed. "Don't bother trying to dissemble. My photograph, with an appropriate story attached – so sad, Damien Thorn attends the funeral of the daughter he never met, and her brother – will set everything you know on fire."

Gene could see that fire, in his mind's eye. Thousands of members of the Watch would see that name, that face, and know that Damien Thorn had returned. That the child they had revered as the reborn Antichrist had died, and nobody had told them. They had been deceived by their own leaders, and now the true Antichrist had returned: of course they would hail him, bow down and adore him. Who wouldn't?

The Beast leaned a little closer, and took Gene's hand in his: Gene could feel his fingers trying to twist out of the other man's grip, but he was scared, too scared to even try to escape.

Thorn's voice was louder now, loud enough to be heard by the other attendees. "The fire is coming. You will ride the flames with me or you will perish; there are no other choices. And it would be better by far that you die now, rather than try and fail me."

A sad smile. A pat on Gene's shoulder. A nod to the 'priest' and then Damien Thorn was going, going away, please yes he was going _away_ , getting into his sleek black car and being driven away. The photographer followed, in his own car.

The 'mourners' and the 'priest' and Gene all stood and looked at each other, stunned to silence.


	9. Creeping In The Dust

Back home the next morning, in front of his laptop, Damien contemplated what he was about to do. It was something that Fallyn had suggested. It wasn't anything shameful, even if it sounded supremely obscene. Everyone did it. He'd have to do it eventually, and it might as well be now.

So he Googled himself.

He had a Wikipedia page that was almost accurate, minus certain details about his nature and purpose. He noticed that there was an update about being seen in Chicago last week – amazing, how fast news could spread! He went to the News tab and was gratified to see that his picture was indeed out in the world.

A little disappointing that all the accompanying text was the same vague paragraph. But he would give them new material. For now, 'Damien Thorn Rumored to Attend Daughter's Funeral in Secret' would be a good first step.

He went back to the search page. Thorn Industries had a very truncated biography of him. He was listed on the Thorn family genealogy page, and on , and on , and in several articles from Chicago newspapers from the past decades. A lot of the articles were simple echoes of each other; he wondered how much of the Internet was nothing but mirrors, bouncing images of the same text and images over and over again.

On the tenth page of results, he went white to the roots of his hair. Right there, in between Famous Recluses and Infamous Murder Attempts of the Twentieth Century, was a page called Damien Thorn Is The Antichrist.

Right there!

He paused to gather himself, to plan his reaction. Then he clicked. And winced.

The page was just ugly. The background was an endless flickering of animated stars, and the text was huge, red and blocky. It was headed DAMIEN THORN IS THE ANTICHRST and had an old picture of himself crudely defaced with horns and a 666 in the middle of his forehead. The text under it was a fervent babbling flood of words mixing quotes from the Bible, ruminations on the weather, prophecies seen in coffee grounds, pleas for money, and utter nonsense. It was clearly the work of a madman. The very opposite of Captain Neff's clean, measured prose and analysis.

And the text went on and on and on, down and down the page, endless ramblings mixed with pictures of cartoony-looking Devils, stylized flames, crosses, nuns, gory corpses…

He grimaced in distaste, and kept scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling. It was all more of the same, thousands of words of it, not a paragraph break to be seen, and not a fragment of sense. Except for the obvious one, that it was based on a truth.

On the other hand, who would believe such a mad truth, with this ranting attached to it? Maybe this page was a good thing for him.

He heard the front doorbell ring. It was too early for the attorneys. Who – oh, it must be Pepita. Her key didn't work of course. He should go see if he could change the food orders – he didn't need any more oatmeal, and he certainly didn't want any more of those microwave dinners.

He opened the door and found her on the doorstep, looking oddly shrunken. No bags of food in her arms, and no warmth in her eyes. Mutely, she held out her hand with two keys in it.

He hesitated, then took her hand, holding it, not letting go. "What's wrong?"

She swallowed visibly. "I'm fired, Mr. Thorn. They told me to come to the office and return the keys, but I thought – I thought if maybe I brought them back to you and asked…" Her voice ran down, and he saw that she was on the brink of tears.

Well he certainly wasn't going to stand for that. Without her help at the very beginning, he could have been considerably hindered in his plans. And her testimony of working here for twelve years, and seeing him dazed and unheeding, would be useful. Considering how rarely Robert Prophet had checked in on him, she was the main witness that he had been incapacitated.

He dimly remembered how she had always politely asked him to move aside when she needed to clean around him. Even though he had never given her a word in reply, she had remained courteous.

So he brought her inside, brought her some coffee, and as they sat in the bright kitchen he offered her a job. Head maid of the Thorn Estate, with other maids working under her. He remembered how much he had paid his staff in the eighties, so he just multiplied that two and a half times to account for inflation.

It didn't stop her crying; in fact it made her cry more. But they were happy tears. And he could feel her loyalty welding itself to him, heating up white-hot, and he savored the heat. If he asked her to right now, she'd throw herself on a bomb to save him – although hopefully that would never be an issue. But he wanted, needed, a staff to obey and serve him, and she was a wonderful first recruit.

Later there would be time for the full initiation.

"You know what I should do?" he said. "I should give you a hiring bonus." He was wearing the jacket he'd worn on his expedition around Chicago, and he still had the last of Fallyn's cash in his pocket. He really did need to thank her as well, that money had been exactly the tool he needed. He took the remaining hundred-dollar bills, folded them in half, and offered them to Pepita.

She reached out, hesitantly. As she took the money he scooped up her old keys, tucking them away and reminding himself to get her new ones before the end of today.

"Mrs. Velazquez, thank you for accepting my offer. I'm using the living room as a meeting area this week, so if you could clean that first today I'd appreciate it. You can clean out the downstairs guestroom, Mr. Prophet has decided to move out. And could you air out the upstairs guest rooms? I've got a friend moving in, and I'd like to give him a choice of rooms. After you're done with that, you can look over the servant's quarters and decide if you'd like to live here. Room and board included in addition to your salary, obviously."

She looked ready to swoon. He just smiled, and poured her more coffee as though he granted wishes every day.

* * *

The attorneys were here, for day two of what was shaping up to be a week-long conferral. Damien had moved some of the side tables and extra chairs into the living room, so there was room for everyone to spread out their papers and laptops. They were reviewing the steps of a competency hearing – not coaching him of course, just covering how long it might take, what was likely to come up, and what sort of opposition they could expect from whomever Thorn Industries sent – when they were interrupted.

It was Pepita, looking scared as she tapped on the open door and said, "Mr. Thorn, the police are here to see you."

The police were standing right behind her, and stepped past her into the room without waiting for an invitation. Two of them, tall and dark, both running a bit to fat the way that everyone seemed to be these days, but still looking entirely capable.

They didn't look like they had been expecting a room full of men and women in suits, surrounded by paperwork. Damien looked up at them with a politely bland expression.

"I'm Damien Thorn," he said, and waited for the officers to introduce themselves. They didn't; instead one of them, the taller one whose name badge read SAYERS, took a notebook out of his pocket and looked at it, looked at him, looked at it. The shorter officer, who was LUCAS apparently, just stood and watched.

"We received a report of a break-in at this address. Sir, do you have some proof of your identity?"

Damien pulled out his wallet, extracted his new driver's license, and stood and handed it to Officer Sayers. Then he waited, standing at rest, to see what they would do.

Officer Sayers looked at the license with a frown. "This was just issued."

"Yes," replied Damien. "I've been incapacitated for some time."

"Isn't there supposed to be a person taking care of you, a Mr. William Maloney? Could we speak to him, please."

"I have no idea where he is, actually. To the best of my knowledge, I've never met him."

Officer Sayers scowled, still not giving back the driver's license. "So you say you've never met the person who lives here?"

"Oh, I've met the man who lives here. But his name is Mr. Prophet, not Mr. Maloney. He said that he'd been hired by Mr. Maloney, actually, so perhaps that is part of the confusion."

Officer Sayers looked around the large and expensively furnished room, and the empty spots where furnishings should be. "If Mr. Maloney isn't here, sir, I think it would be best if you just came with us down to the station, so we can double-check your identification."

"Am I under arrest?" Damien asked, and felt his legal team all tense in unison.

"No, of course not." That was Officer Lucas, apparently designated to play the good cop.

"Still, under the circumstances, I'd like to have my attorney present."

"Do you have an attorney?" said Officer Sayers, with a slightly condescending tone in his voice.

All of the men and women in the room stood up. Damien mentally preened for a moment, enjoying the looks of dismay on the two officers' faces. "Mrs. Fitzpatrick, let's take your car. Everyone else, please wait, this shouldn't take long. There's a lunch being brought in at noon, if we aren't back by then. Officers," he smiled at them, "we'll follow you."

At the police station everything was crisp efficiency. Damien's fingers were inked and rolled onto a sheet, which was fed into a scanner. A printout was produced from some government archive, and fed into the same machine. A slender man with thick glasses looked at the results, then up at the watching policemen and Damien with an authoritative expression.

"They're a match. At least twenty points of comparison. This is Damien Thorn."

Damien didn't move, but he thought he could feel the policemen around him deflate. This wasn't the result they had been expecting. His fingerprints were on file of course, he had been an ambassador, but why had they expected them not to match?

Who had told them they would not match?

"Welcome back," said the fingerprints man, scratching his cheek for an instant. He scratched it in a very specific way: he brought his hand close to his cheek, then scratched with his second and third fingers only. Which left his first and fourth fingers making the sign of the Horns, however subtly.

He was one of the Watch. More and more interesting…

Damien smiled an innocent smile. "Officers, thank you for straightening things out. If you don't mind waiting, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, I'd like to go wash my hands." He left his attorney and the police looking mistrustfully at each other, and headed to the nearest washroom.

He actually did wash his hands – they had given him a wipe to get the ink off, but it wasn't as efficient as he would like – and he wasn't at all surprised when the door opened behind him and the fingerprints man came in, and walked directly to Damien.

Without even thinking, Damien reached out and took the man under one elbow in a firm grip, otherwise he would have fallen to his knees. He was used to this sort of gesture, even more so than most overly handsome men. He leaned his head close to the other man and hissed, "No."

The fingerprints man swallowed, audibly, and whispered back, "Is it true – true that Alexander is dead?"

Damien glanced at the door and answered, "Yes."

A single choked-off sob. "Oh yes…oh thank you, thank you for killing him! He – thank you."

"Pull yourself together." That in his coldest tone, and he watched keenly as the man straightened. Then Damien smiled. "And you're welcome." Not that he had killed Alexander, of course – that had been his Father's demons – but he had no problem with taking credit for it.

* * *

He was back at the Thorn Estate before lunch arrived, and he made sure to note that he felt the officers' visit was harassment. Possibly set up the person who monitored his cameras (those would have to stay up until an expert on such things was available to dismantle and examine them). Finding out exactly who was trying to harass him would be part of the discovery phase. Interrogation of witnesses, requests for documents, depositions from interested parties – he couldn't wait. Of course he was going to have to wait a little while longer.

You needed to appear before a judge for a competency hearing, and Mr. Scott had pulled strings to get a space in the appropriate calendar. Judge Samantha Masters would be meeting with Damien and his people tomorrow morning, along with any other interested parties. Would Paul Buher dare attend himself? He hoped so. Paul was very much on his mind these days.

Damien got up and went into the kitchen, as though to grab some fresh coffee. He didn't go for the coffee machine, though, but for the old phone. He had his notebook with him, well-worn now with much handling, but the number written across the front was still clear. The emergency number, that Pepita or Robert Prophet were to call if he was injured.

His attorneys hadn't said that he should call this number, but they also hadn't said that he shouldn't. And after his flights back and forth, and trips downtown and back, he wanted a little diversion. Who knew? Maybe the sound of his, Damien's, voice would bring Paul back to his senses. If he surrendered, if he turned over the keys to the kingdom in all humility, he might be spared.

Might.

Damien picked up the phone and dialed, click-click-click of the little plastic buttons. A ring. An elongated ring. Another – and then the line was picked up and someone said "Who-" and cut themselves short.

Damien smiled, eyes wide. It was him. It was Paul Buher, he knew it. The voice was older, and frightened, and very very tired. But it was the one who had betrayed him, trapped him, and raised his son to be a monster instead of a true Beast.

He gathered himself, concentrating. "Paul, I want you to-"

A shrill shriek was his answer, drowning him out, breaking his concentration. "FUCK YOU!" Paul screamed, and then the line went dead.

Damien looked at the receiver meditatively, rolling the cord between the fingers of his other hand. "You never did, Paul." He hung it up a little too slowly, feeling the weight leave his fingers, the final click punctuating the silence. "And you never will."

Then he went to tell Pepita that she did not have to let the police in, ever, without talking to him first.

* * *

In the early evening dusk Captain Neff drove up the curving driveway of the Thorn Estate, carefully. The rental truck he was driving was full to the safety limit, and even though he'd strapped down all his boxes very tightly, the load was still top-heavy.

He pulled up to the front, only to have a woman with a Spanish accent direct him around the house to the loading entrance, which was apparently where the food deliveries would go when the house was fully staffed. Damien was there, in shirtsleeves but paying no attention to the cold, waiting to help unload despite Neff's protestations.

"You're here for me, Daniel. I want to help." And how could anyone refuse that offer.

The loading entrance was close to an elevator to the second floor, which Neff had never used during the social visits he had attended here before. Damien explained that it had been put it for Robert and Ann Thorn, who were planning to live here until they were in wheelchairs.

There had been a time when saying those names would make Damien tense up, go cold: but not anymore. They had been his second parents, but once he had accepted his true Father, all others were surpassed.

The rental truck had come with a sturdy loading cart, which they used to tow box after box of books to the downstairs library or up to the second floor. Damien let Neff take his pick of the rooms, but recommended one that had particularly good light in the summer, and was only two doors down from the master bedroom, so of course Neff chose that. The Spanish woman, Mrs. Velazquez, had already made up the bed, so all Neff had to do was toss in his rucksack of clothes and then unload those books that he was going to be consulting every day, from now until – everything was over.

When Damien noticed that Neff didn't have enough bookshelves in his new room, he went down to the library, cleared off two of the freestanding shelves, and carried them up the main staircase and into Neff's room. He did it easily, without breaking a sweat, and only once he'd put them down and left did Neff realize that the shelves were solid walnut, and probably three hundred pounds apiece.

Over dinner they discussed the drive from Wisconsin to Illinois (uneventful), the state of Neff's house (properly winterized, and his boat was already in wraps at the storage dock), and what books he had brought (that discussion took up most of the meal, and they had to remind each other to finish their chicken and spinach before it went cold). There had been a lot of Biblical research published in the last thirty years, new authors, new theories, even new original material such as the Gallistrian manuscripts and the additional Dead Sea Scrolls. Damien was going to be having a very full study schedule, on top of his work schedule.

"I met one of the Watch today," Damien said, as they finished the last of their food. "Working in the police department. Don't worry," he waved a hand to dismiss Neff's start, "it came to nothing. They checked my fingerprints and confirmed that I was who I said I was."

"I'd expect that Buher would have tried to change the records," Neff noted.

"I'd expect the same … I wonder why he didn't. Maybe someone who was loyal to me switched them back." Damien raised both eyebrows, then went on a little more seriously. "But the member of the Watch I met was ready to throw himself on his knees to me, in thanks for my killing Alexander."

Neff thought of the Bible, of the images of beasts and monsters that were slain and healed. Damien killing Alexander could fit any of those verses. Damien seemed to catch his thought.

"I didn't kill him, Daniel. My Father did."

"He deserved to die," Neff said, looking Damien straight in the eye. "He was no fit son of you, or scion of your Father. He was a willing tool of Paul Buher, and with his help Buher turned your company into nothing but – but a funnel, sucking money away. Money, profits, that was all that mattered to him, just as pleasure was all that mattered to Alexander."

Damien sat still, his eyes darting back and forth, lost in his own thoughts. When he finally spoke, his voice was husky.

"I shall have authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. And it shall be my will that all shall love me, and worship me, and receive my Mark. Short shall be the days of those who lead men into temptation and corruption in my name or the name of my Father for the sake of gold and silver, and cold their hearth. And warm shall be the hearts of all men, who look on me and adore me."

The Beast had spoken.

* * *

Beare Medical Supplies in Jefferson City, Missouri (a subsidiary of Breau GmbH, itself wholly and secretly owned by Thorn Biomedical) was a one-stop shop for all your medical needs, according to their website. Bed lifts? Automated toilets? Wound irrigation tools? Embalming equipment? Restraints? Gloves by the pair or by the gross? Complete surgical suites? Autoclaves? They had it all!

They did not advertise another service that they offered: bleeding the dying dry. People would have a trust fund that could only be used to buy medical care for an invalid relative of theirs, say. Beare Medical Supplies would invoice them for a considerably larger volume of equipment than they needed, and kick back half the charges to the family.

They also did special projects. In the case of the Thorn account, they invoiced nearly a quarter of a million dollars worth of equipment and supplies, and shipped none of it. The orders were that you could charge anything – anything! – on this account.

Orders were orders, but Ben Beare was cautious. Once every quarter he sat in the offices late at night and generated the invoice for the "supplies" to be "shipped" over the next three months, got the automated payment from the Thorn account, and sent it to be deposited offshore. Ben wanted to retire young, and the Thorn account was going to be a big part of it.

Let's see, they'd already 'sent' Mr. Thorn a new bed last year, so he wouldn't need that. But protective gear, incontinence supplies, sheets: those could be added by the gross. Catheters, and who cared if he was ordering enough to give the patient a fresh one every two hours. Needles and syringes, of course. Perhaps a new top-of-the-line ventilator? A heart rate monitor or three – oh, the new wireless ones would be good. And some nasogastric feeding tubes, and nutritional supplements. He had a nice little imaginary picture of Damien Thorn in his mind: a limp lump of meat, gently hemorrhaging money into his pocket through every orifice.

Once the invoice was ready, all he had to do was get the funds and-

It wouldn't go through.

It wouldn't go through.

Ben sent the request a third time, for automated debit from the Thorn account, but it didn't come up as No Funds Available. It came up as Account Locked. Account Locked, what the hell did that mean? He hissed angrily through his teeth – and heard another hiss in reply.

He was sitting in the back of the office space adjoining the warehouse. The hiss had not been the hiss of a compressed air tank breaking off at the tap, or a radiator starting to leak. It had sounded alive. And close.

Something moved in his lap. Slowly, trying to move only his eyes and not his head, he looked down.

A snake. Oh dear lord Jesus it was a SNAKE, right here, here in his lap and it was TOUCHING him, it was crawling over his lap and his legs, he could FEEL its loathsome body through his pants that were suddenly damp. The snake was black and slick and horrible, and he could tell just looking at it that it was as full of poison as a snake could be: that its teeth and its mouth and maybe even its BREATH were pure, toxic poison.

Ben was frozen, in terror and revulsion. He hated snakes, more than anything in the world he hated snakes. He couldn't move his hands from the keyboard, he could only watch as the snake, the THING, started to crawl up his body. Maybe the warmth of his piss had spooked it – or maybe it was just evil, just an evil horrible THING that wanted to crawl up him, to touch him, to put its polluted filthy scales and tongue all over his FACE, in his MOUTH, into his EYES-

His hands were trembling on the keyboard keys, and he pulled his eyes away from the snake and looked straight ahead, trying to pretend that the whispering of its scales as it oozed up his body wasn't real. His eyes saw something on his desk, and locked on it as a chance at salvation.

He got lots of little medical knick-knacks as giveaways from various medical companies who wanted his company to carry their wares. A surgical supplies company had given him a fancy trocar, engraved with their name. It was a hollow metal tube about the size of a pen with a clamping apparatus at one end, and a very sharp point on the other. Very sharp.

He could feel the snake rising up him like floodwaters, like death. Its head was already higher than his heart, and he thought he could feel its foul breath on his neck. Any minute now it would strike him, bite him and drip his veins full of its venom – unless he struck first.

Quickly, his hand darted and got a firm grip on the trocar, and he turned it round and stabbed the snake, stabbed it and it was hissing, hissing and bleeding, hissing and dying, its black blood spurting everywhere, and he was stabbing and stabbing until …

Ben's head lolled back in triumph. The snake is DEAD, he thought, and then he lost consciousness. The trocar, lodged into his chest just to the right of his breastbone, let a dark stream of his heart's blood out onto the floor around him.

When the police photographed the scene in the morning, they took pictures of the dead man. Of the invoices on his desk. Of the trocar, still buried deep in his body. But not of the snake, of course. There was no snake there, dead or alive, and no sign a snake had ever been there.


	10. Laying The Foundations

The Chicago court room was very bland, very modern. Chairs, tables, an elevated dais for the judge. The court reporter was already waiting, as were Damien and his attorneys and his witnesses. Judge Samantha Masters was there, formal in her stiff black robes. They were waiting for the representatives from Thorn Industries to arrive, as they said they would, to challenge Damien's identity and competence.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick carefully sorted through two of her file folders, moving papers from one to the other.

Judge Masters examined her nails.

Captain Neff sat with an expression of deepest calm, next to Wade McBatts who looked like he was holding onto his calmness with some effort.

Damien smiled, and when his gaze crossed that of Judge Masters he gave an apologetic little shrug. Sorry everything is being held up, that shrug said. Not my fault…

Finally someone came walking a little too quickly through the doors in the back. A single man in an expensive suit that was rumpled-looking, probably due to the flabby body under it, and with a pile of folders clutched to his chest. Damien hid his contempt, which felt like it was sizzling under his skin. This is who they sent? This was the best they could come up with?

"My apologies, Your Honor, I was…delayed." The man introduced himself as Attorney Miles Smythe, for Thorn Industries.

Judge Masters took command of the room with a single frosty glance; Damien was impressed. "Gentlemen, ladies, now that we are all here, are there any preliminary matters that need to be discussed before we get down to business?"

There were none. Damien's team was asked to make their initial statement. It was simple enough: they were going to prove the identity and competence of Mr. Damien Thorn, who was here in the flesh. They were asking for a suspension of Thorn Industries' legal guardianship over Mr. Thorn and their control over his business shares and other property, on the grounds that he was no longer in medical distress.

"You have proof that this is Damien Thorn?" and they offered the fingerprint records with an affidavit. They offered copies of his birth certificate, with an explanation that all of Mr. Thorn's original documents had been taken from his house while he was incapacitated, by parties unknown. If Her Honor wished it, they could offer testimony from Mr. Wade McBatts, who had known Mr. Thorn since he was in his twenties; and from Captain Daniel Neff, retired, who had known him in military school.

"That won't be necessary." Judge Masters focused her gaze on Damien. "Mr. Thorn, I'd like you to give me, and the court, some more detail on your medical condition, past and current."

He stood, and gave a neutral description of what he remembered – minus the more colorful aspects. Being stabbed, being brought back to America, feeling as though his head was full of fog. Able to feed and bathe and dress himself – and no more. No memories of nurses, therapists, exercise routines: just himself, stumbling around his house. A Mrs. Pepita Velazquez, who had served as a weekly maid for the last twelve years, could also testify to his mental state.

"And how did you recover?"

"I don't know," he lied. "I woke up one morning, on December 29th to be exact, and my mind seemed clearer. I called Captain Neff, he's an old friend of mine, and then I got in contact with the McBatts."

"Have you been examined by a doctor, Mr. Thorn?"

"Not yet. I've been trying to find my family physician, but he's retired and, well, I hate to just pick someone out of the phone book."

"What about the physician who examined you every year for the past thirty-three years, and filed papers with the court that you were still medically incapacitated?" The Judge's eyes slid to Mr. Smythe, who looked like he wanted to leap up and protest but didn't quite dare. "This," she glanced at a paper at her elbow, "Doctor Allan Larson?"

Damien glanced at Mr. Scott, who rose and said, "Your Honor, we have been unable to contact Doctor Larson. It appears that the paperwork filed may have been tampered with."

Mr. Smythe did manage to get up for that, but immediately sat back down.

"Mr. Smythe, did you have something to add?" Judge Masters' voice was as sweet as a silk-wrapped knife.

"No, Your Honor."

"Well." She looked Damien up and down, and appeared to like what she saw. "Mr. Thorn, you have proven your identity as least to my satisfaction. I hope you realize that in cases like this, with the control of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property in question, the possibility of fraud or imposters does come to mind."

"You Honor, I am not a fraud; I am a person who has been defrauded. I only ask for your help in letting me prove my identity to the world, and take back what is rightfully mine."

"A laudable ambition, Mr. Thorn. Now I'd like to hear from Mr. Smythe, representing Thorn Industries."

Mr. Smythe was a wreck, and Damien wasn't even doing anything to influence him, except sit quietly and listen to him ramble. Thorn industries' line of defense seemed to simply be that Damien Thorn was still in his house, in a coma, and this man was an imposter. The fingerprint records were false, there were no other original documents to be found, and the people who could testify to his 'real' identity were clearly part of the conspiracy.

"Are you filing a criminal case at this time, Mr. Smythe?"

"That – I'm not authorized to do that."

"Well, I am authorized to send a court-appointed physician to the Thorn residence, to examine the man there and determine if he is Damien Thorn. As the legal guardian of the Thorn estate-"

"I can't – he can't be seen. By anyone. His medical condition is very delicate, he requires round-the-clock care-"

Mr. Scotts interjected that he had gone over the entire Thorn Estate with a camera, and seen no sign of such a person: no hospital beds, no medical equipment. Damien added that he lived there and could testify that there were no invalids under his roof, now that he was back to himself.

And when asked, Mr. Smythe was completely unable to provide any document, testimony, or any recollection at all of where the "real" Damien Thorn could actually be.

Damien was gloating, deep inside. His enemies must be falling apart, unable to even plan for the simplest request from the court. He wondered how many defectors had fled, unwilling to work for their false leaders – and how many of them he could sweep back into his fold. Hopefully he could get things under control before his companies literally collapsed in on themselves for lack of employees.

The outcome was never really in doubt. Judge Masters ruled that – in the absence of any meaningful defense from the representative of Thorn Industries, and subject to future review – she was suspending Thorn Industries' legal guardianship over the person and property of Damien Thorn. She trusted (this said with a sharp stare) that Mr. Thorn was going to follow all appropriate legal paths to regain control of his assets. And that he was also going to see a doctor, very soon.

He would. He promised.

He sent one of the attorneys outside to check; yes, there were reporters waiting for him. He had the driver bring the car around, but did not dart into it like a frightened fox. Instead he strolled out, being certain to pause in a spot of sunshine for the rising cellphones to get his picture, and outright sauntered to his car with a smile. He didn't answer any questions. There would be time for that very soon.

He made certain to call ahead and ask the security firm to do a sweep of his front gates. He didn't want to be ambushed by the press there. So far no one had dared to jump the fence, but that would change. He was going to need a permanent security presence on the estate. Soon.

* * *

Thorn Industries.

Thorn Corporation.

Thorn Engineering.

Thorn Entertainment.

Thorn Biomedical.

Thorn Relief Fund.

Thorn Lafite.

The list of companies went on and on, and the paperwork for each company could be dozens of pages. But steadily, stolidly, like a bull swimming through a lake, Damien Thorn read and signed, read and signed.

There was a courier standing by, with a pile of prepaid express envelopes. Once these letters were delivered, every branch of the sprawling Thorn multiconglomerate tree would know that Damien Thorn had returned, and intended to take his rightful place at the crown – or perhaps as the crown – of that tree.

He had considered showing his legal team Fallyn's presentation about how large Thorn actually was, but had decided not to. It would lead to a cascade of issues. No, he wanted to see if he could grasp the problem just by the tips of the horns, and use those to twist and drag it all back under his control.

And once it was all under his control, what wonders he could accomplish! He'd been following the news, on the television and on the Internet, and there were disasters all over the world: people crying, begging for help. Famine, drought, poverty, debt, flooding, war, plague – the list went on and on. And wouldn't they admire and adore the man who helped them out, raised them up? Wouldn't they worship such a man?

There were other things that he planned to find out right away. Like what had happened to his personal property from the Embassy in London. In 1982, after his attack, the staff had arranged to have everything put into storage – somewhere.

It was urgent that he find out where his property was, because along with some of his choicer books and certain artworks that certainly shouldn't be seen in public, there had been six daggers at the Embassy. Six weapons he had taken from those who had tried to destroy him. The seventh dagger, the one that actually stabbed him, was probably locked in some evidence room in London. He was going to have to acquire that as well. He needed the daggers of Megiddo back under his control. They were the last, faintest hope of someone stopping him, and he wanted there to be no hope. No hope at all.

Filling out the paperwork was made more entertaining by talking with his attorneys about the next filing with the court that they planned. The one naming Persons Unknown (Thorn Industries) and charging them with conspiracy, fraud, theft, false imprisonment, battery and abuse against one Damien Thorn. That was going to be a civil as well as a criminal case, and the damages were going to be in the millions.

* * *

The next day, he made time to call Fallyn White. She answered with the usual tremor of excitement in her voice, from talking to him.

"Good morning, Mr. Thorn."

"I need to contact some people, Miss White. I'm restaffing the house and if you could recommend anyone local, I'd appreciate it."

"I can do that." She sounded a little disappointed.

"And I also need to send an email to the entire Thorn Industries board, plus anyone else who owns shares. Can you help me?"

"Yes I can," she almost sang. That sounded much more to her liking. "I already have an email program set up on your laptop, if you can turn it on and launch the tunnel, I'll set it all up remotely."

"Are you at work right now?" he asked.

"Yes."

"And they'll let you just get on the Internet and do that?"

A sharp laugh. "Everyone gets on the Internet at work now. And I don't think I need to worry about anyone spying on me today. There's a lot of people taking time off. Can't imagine why."

"I can." Rats scurrying for their holes, hoping to keep their heads down and escape the whirlwind.

He could hear a smile in Fallyn's voice. "For your email," her voice dropped to a whisper, "as it happens I own the domain damien thorn dot com. Would you like to use it, to give your email that official touch?"

"You own the – the Internet domain? The Web page and email and such?"

"Yep."

He was baffled. "Why?"

Her voice went back to normal. "So that no one else would buy it, of course!" A snort. "Certain people been trying to get it for ages, but I bought it early, under an alias, and refused to sell. If you give me access to your laptop, I'll turn on email receiving and have everything ready. Give me an hour or so, then we'll concall and I'll walk you through it. We should probably discuss some particular kinds of emails you'll get – actually, I'll just route all the obvious spam into folders and you can parse it later."

Spam? He'd have to ask.

"I'll trust in your judgment, Miss White. Oh, and I was hoping that you could recommend a doctor to me – someone who could perform a general physical exam, and maybe something more …"

* * *

1/6/2016

To: Thorn_Industries_Board_Mailing_List; private_shareholders_list

Ladies and Gentlemen –

I am Damien Thorn. You have been told that I was unable to perform my duties as Thorn Industries CEO and Chairman of the Board due to permanent physical medical incapacity, resulting from an assault in 1982. I am delighted to tell you that I am fully recovered from the injuries I was dealt.

Now I look forward to seeing all of you at the Thorn Industries Tower in Chicago IL on the evening of January 8th, for a private shareholders' meeting. I'm sure that all of you must be as excited as I am to meet face to face and discuss the future of our great company.

A full agenda will follow.

(Signed) Damien Thorn

He hit 'send'. And smiled.

* * *

Like many very smart people, Fallyn White was arrogant. Because she had thought over all of the ways that her activities could be exposed, and covered up her tracks in all the ways that she could think of, she was smugly certain that she could do as she pleased, undetected.

As well, she had a bias towards her fellow Thorn employees, many of whom were as smart as she was or smarter. Since that was the case, she felt unconsciously that they would agree with her actions, if they knew about them.

Robin Eich was passing by the cell phone lockers at just the wrong time and heard her say "…ning, Mr. Thorn." And he paused, and then went on before she could turn and see that someone had heard her excited slip of the tongue. But he sat down at his desk, and he did a little tracing of his own of Fallyn's movements, and her computer usage, and her shopping. She was good at false leads, but he was good at sniffing them out. She had obfuscated the automated tools that would aggregate data and show specific patterns, but there was no defense against a fresh set of eyes going through the raw data. And he had access to a lot of raw data – they all did, in this very special section of the company.

When he was certain, he stepped out and made a call to someone, who made a call to someone, who informed Paul Buher himself that they had the name and location of at least one person besides Daniel Neff who was actively aiding Damien Thorn.

Robin went back to his own work, smugly certain that he would be rewarded for his efforts. He shuffled his feet against the carpet for a moment. They felt cold, all of a sudden.


	11. Backstabber

The house was starting to come back to life rather nicely, Damien thought: the curtains were pulled back from some of the windows, and the dusted areas expanded farther and farther as Pepita and her crew worked to make the place clean. The roar of vacuum cleaners was a constant during some parts of the day. But there were still quiet times, when everyone was elsewhere, when Damien could just sit and think. So much to think about, and so wonderful to be able to think and feel without that Other, his opposite, constantly blaring against him.

It had not even been two weeks, and already such progress had been made! The online newspapers were full of his name, and pictures of him young and old, and speculation as to what he would or would not do. The news of his meeting with the board tonight had leaked out, which was just perfect. If Thorn Industries had been a publicly traded company, the stock would be flopping around like a fish on a hook: he imagined that there was plenty of behind-the-scenes selling and buying of shares right now. The return of Damien Thorn was going to be the story of the year, the news burbled, not realizing that it was going to be the story of the millennium.

The maids and Neff were out right now. It was so quiet this morning that he could hear a car pulling up out front. Probably one of the attorneys, with something new for him to sign. He'd have to answer the door himself.

He pulled the door open at the first knock and looked down at Fallyn White. An ID card dangled around her neck, as though she'd come here straight from work. She looked up at him, her face frozen with absolute horror and fear, bottomless fear. She was trembling, he could see it.

"Come in, come in," he urged, and she stepped forward with the slow, painful steps of someone sleepwalking – or trying to run in a nightmare. He closed the door behind her, and listened as the tiny echoes faded away. It was so quiet right now. Just the two of them, all alone. Something must have happened that she would come to the front door during the day, instead of sneaking in under the cover of darkness.

She was just standing there with her back to him, and finally he asked, "What's wrong, Miss White?"

She cleared her throat and started walking into the house, and he trailed after her.

"The Board sent me with their answer to your email," she said. "I think they s-sent some other people and something happened and they couldn't do it, so they ordered me to deliver it. And call them when I'd delivered it. I don't know," she sobbed once as she stepped into the sitting room, "I don't know why me, maybe they thought a woman could get through…"

She was not making any sense, so he hung onto the one thing that did make sense. "The Board sent you with – what, exactly?"

She turned and she was crying, red-faced, tears dripping down her cheeks. She stepped backwards, away from him, and then she knelt on the carpet and pulled something from under her winter coat, sliding it along the floor hilt-first to lie black and gleaming at his feet.

"They sent me with this," she whisper-sobbed.

He stared down at her, and at it. The rage in his face was ghastly, bestial: for an instant it was as though he wasn't a man standing there but something else, something great and primal and full of fury – but then he calmed himself.

Fallyn was still kneeling, arms spread and hands flat on the carpet as though to prove her helplessness. Or as though crucified by his gaze. He reached down, watching her, fingers dancing around until they grasped cold metal, and then stood up a little more quickly to examine his prize.

The hilt was the same, and the narrow, deadly triangular blade. The sick, heavy weight of it in his hand. The sense of destiny and death clinging to it like a sheath. A dagger of Megiddo.

They had sent her to murder him.

"I wouldn't," she sobbed from the floor, "I wouldn't, Mr. Thorn, please believe me, I swear I never, ever would…"

He looked at her with bright eyes. "That's good," he said abruptly. "Keep doing that."

"W-what?" She looked up at him, confused.

"Keep crying, that's it. Cry, and call and tell them it's done." He saw her try to catch her breath and leaned over and flicked her on the tip of the nose with his fingernail, hard, knowing exactly the sort of sharp burning pain that would cause. She needed to be breathless with crying, she need to sound devastated when she talked to them.

"Call them. Now!"

She did just as he asked: she clawed her phone out of her pocket and dialed a number and kept weeping, weeping, weeping. She sobbed into the phone, "It's done. He … it's done," and then listened, still sobbing. "Yes," she sobbed, "I can – I can do that. Yes." She gulped, and tapped the phone off.

She was still crying, and Damien looked at her, dagger gripped firmly in one hand. He held one of the weapons that could actually harm him, could end his physical life, and he didn't want to risk her trying to wrest it from him.

Her mouth was wide as she gasped for air, and then she expelled it in a noise that was somewhere between a sob and a laugh. Then it was mostly laughter, as she rose to her feet and looked up at him.

"And?" he asked.

Her face was wet with tears and her smile was brilliant as the sun. "They said," she hiccoughed, "they said they are sending someone. He's coming here, now, to take your body away. _And he is bringing the other six_."

The other six. The other six daggers. The only things that could hurt him – and they would all be his.

Damien laughed along with her, as they went to set the stage.

* * *

Javier was the sort of amoral young man who if you told him to pick up a package, go to a mansion and pick up a dead body and a woman, bring the body and the package and the woman to a church, and then kill the woman and leave both bodies and the package, would simply ask, "How much?"

The answer had been a nice large number, and he had started his painter's van and headed right over to get the package. The van was useful for all sorts of things: storing small objects he was going to pawn, moving large objects from their original owners to the pawnshop, a place to sleep when his girlfriends weren't feeling friendly, a place to get friendly, a place to bring girls and make them be friendly. Really, it was better than having an apartment.

He had no idea who his employer was, and he didn't particularly care. Everything was done via text. He always was given jobs that combined business with pleasure, and when he was done he would be paid, in cash, via a drop. Easy living.

The package was handed to him through a fast food drive-in window, along with his food and some coke to go with his Coke. As he ate and drank and snorted in the parking lot, he looked over the package: it was heavy cloth wrapped in straps, and it clanked. Tools? He squeezed one end and yelped when metal pricked his finger. Knives, maybe. Fine, fine, he liked knives.

The mansion looked like it had been really fancy, once. Now it was sort of run-down. The gates were open, no guards. There was only one car in front of it, but he spotted the tracks of other cars, places where they had parked. No matter how it looked, this place wasn't sealed up for the winter. He needed to grab the corpse and the woman and scat out of here, fast.

He slipped up to the door and knocked, and it opened at once.

Damn, Javier thought. This must be the woman, and she was not hot at all. At least thirty-five, chunky, and he could tell just looking at her that she was the sort of woman who read too many books. And she was tall; she might even be taller than he was if he wasn't wearing his boots. She'd been crying, and the crying was the sexiest thing about her. She let him into the house and closed the door behind him.

His eyes crawled over the walls – lots of empty spaces. Looks like someone already took all the good stuff. "Where's the guy?" he asked the crying woman, his eyes crawling over her in turn.

"Th-the guy?"

"The guy, the dead guy." He'd have been told if it was a woman he had to move. "And the knife," he added. They'd said to make sure that he brought the knife with them as well. She jumped when he said the word, so she must know what he meant.

"He's in here," she said, and opened a door to his right; it led into a square room lined with coat racks, with mirrors and benches here and there. It was as fancy as a restaurant. In the middle of the room was a white-haired man lying on his side, with his back to them. He looked dead enough.

He glanced at the crying woman for a second and looked back FUCK the man was awake, standing and right up in his face, how the fuck – how the fuck had he done that? He'd been across the room and now he was here, alive, awake, staring down into his eyes like he was – like he was –

Javier fell backwards but managed to stay on his feet. His high-heeled boots scrabbled frantically at the floor as he tried to press his back through the wall, but there was no way to run, no possibility of running. He was locked onto those blue eyes, drowning in them, looking at them seemed as necessary as breathing. He couldn't look away, any more than he could stop his own heart.

The man moved closer and Javier whimpered, whimpered like a scared little baby, whimpered like a _pussy_ , but he couldn't help himself. He was so afraid, but he had to stay, needed to stay, needed to –

"Where are the daggers?" the white-haired man asked.

He needed to obey, that was it. If he obeyed, maybe – "I don't know about daggers! I don't have them!" Then he remembered, and scrabbled in his pocket, pulling out his keys and holding them between them like a frail barrier. "Tools, tools in my van. That's it, that's them." Please, please, let that be them.

The man plucked the keys from his shaking fingers, and handed them somewhere to Javier's left – to the woman, he guessed. He couldn't turn his head and see, his head felt like it was locked in a brace, nailed by the other man's stare. "Take the seventh one with you, and go get them," he told her. "And wait outside."

The woman moved past them, then came back. She was holding a long skinny dagger by the blade, and the silver figure of Christ on the handle gleamed in the light. He tried to follow that gleam with his eyes, he tried to pray, but he couldn't.

Then the door closed, and Javier was alone. With him.

* * *

Fallyn put the dagger down on the table by the door. She thought she could hear Mr. Thorn's voice speaking behind the door, very softly, but she didn't stop to listen closer. She had the feeling that listening too closely would be bad for her health.

The van was white under the road grime, and had a pipe rack on top. She opened the passenger side door and crinkled her nose at the smell of dirty clothes, gasoline, and old fast food wrappers. But the cloth bundle on the seat – she undid the straps and looked inside, and counted. One, two, three, four, five, six – and she sighed with relief. All six, and the one she'd brought made seven. They had all seven.

She took the bundle from the van. It was lighter than she had thought it would be, for such potent, poisonous weapons. She paused to watch the crow perched on the casing of the house camera; now, why had the crows – oh of course, the crows had let the cameras be uncovered, so that the Thorn board would see that no cars were here, so that they would send her here.

She shivered, at how close she had come to death, at how stupid the leaders of Thorn Industries had become. They could have sent someone to move Mr. Thorn's corpse to a church for the complete ritual, and had the daggers waiting there. The daggers were the one thing, or rather things, that could derail the ascendance of the Antichrist, and those morons had thrown them away.

She kept shivering in the hallway, even though it was warm enough. She unrolled the bundle and found a slot to put the seventh dagger. She wondered how long they'd had all of them. She presumed these would have been able to kill Alexander, and Buher wouldn't want that, now would he? He would have made certain all of them were together, where he could keep them hidden and safe.

She waited, and stared at the puppy. The puppy had not attacked her when she entered the house with the lone dagger, but when she came in with all seven it had suddenly appeared. It was standing with its shoulder pressed against the door of the coatroom, and it looked furious: tail out stiff, eyes frozen to her. She tried not to appear threatening, and kept her hands in plain view. It would have been comical, the tiny dog menacing the adult woman, if her fear wasn't so obvious.

A rumble of a car outside – she rolled the daggers back up into their bundle, all seven together now, and slung it on its strap over her shoulder like a toolkit. Using a hallway mirror, she quickly blotted a stray tear from her cheek, and tidied up the worst of her makeup smudges. The puppy kept glaring. Laughter and a key in the lock, and two young women entered.

"Hola!" said Fallyn with a wide fake smile, and a short conversation in Spanish followed. Fallyn explained that she was here to help Mr. Thorn set up his email account, because he'd never used email or texting or anything. Mr. Thorn? He was around here somewhere, talking to a painter or a plumber or someone like that – the guy with the van outside. She showed her Thorn ID card to the ladies, who were apparently maids, but they seemed to buy her story even without the props. They went on into the house, chatting together.

Fallyn grabbed her own wrist, willing her heart to slow down. She could feel her pulse pounding under her fingertips, booming in her ears. She concentrated on that, and only that, and not on the words being said too quietly in the next room, or the wet sounds.

Finally, when the sounds of the maids had faded away completely, the coatroom door opened. The puppy scampered away, tail wagging, as Mr. Thorn came out. He was towing the intruder by one elbow, and when Fallyn saw the man's face she cringed inside. But she swallowed her fear and looked at Mr. Thorn and asked, "Now what?"

"Give him the van keys." She pressed the keys into one dangling hand. Not – not that she could understand what use he would have for them, now.

"I don't know where to go," the intruder said in a dreamy voice.

Mr. Thorn leaned close to him, and whispered soothingly, "Where you're going, you won't need eyes to see." And the man actually smiled at this, smiled like it was a gift or a promise.

A little shove, and the man was moving dreamily toward the front door. He reached it, patted it to find the doorknob, and stepped outside. Mr. Thorn followed, and watched through the window beside the door as the man slowly went down the steps towards his van.

There was a crow on the van, sitting perched on the drivers' side windshield wiper. It seemed to be staring at the house, then its beak turned to point at the man who was climbing into the van, and starting it.

Fallyn watched sickly from the window on the other side of the door. She watched at the man backed up, as the sun ran over his slick face and his blissful smile and the clenched holes that used to be eyes. The crow turned around and fluffed out its feathers, and deliberately as a train on its tracks the blinded man drove down the driveway, jerking back and forth and then correcting.

The van was at the end of the driveway, and it paused for a long moment. Then it turned left, and accelerated. Fallyn watched as the white van wavered and then straightened, the black speck of the crow now soaring above and ahead of it. A horn blared from a passing car. The van went roaring away faster and faster until it was out of sight.

Well. That had certainly been impressive. She wondered how long the man would be able to drive unimpeded, and how many people he would run over along the way, before they stopped him. If he could even be stopped. Maybe he would just drive on until he ran out of road.

She stepped back from the window, and Mr. Thorn looked at her with a measuring expression. He moved closer, and she fancied she could smell blood on his breath. She had thought that the intruder must have wiped the blood off his face, but what if it had been, well, _licked_ off? The man's eyes were gone. Did Mr. Thorn – did Mr. Thorn eat them? Did he make the man eat his own eyes? Or did they pass them from mouth to mouth to each other before-

Oh, she wanted to get out of here, get back to work, go home, but she didn't dare until she had been dismissed. She felt like a rabbit, hypnotized by a beautiful, menacing cobra, knowing it was the instrument of death and unable to move – and she wondered if the foolish little man with the swaggering boots and the filthy van had felt the same way.

He came another step closer, and his hand slid into the cloth bundle that was still hanging on its strap over her shoulder, forgotten. It emerged clenching a dagger by the hilt, long blade standing out from his fist like a single black finger.

* * *

Damien stared at Fallyn. Tears still damp on her collar, visibly frightened, but she wasn't running. Still here, still obedient to his words.

He wished that he had met her when she was a child. He wished that she could have lived her whole life under his reign. Well. He would make certain that she would live the rest of her life under his reign.

He wasn't going to kill her, of course. She was far too valuable. She had given him something of inestimable value, been his most perfect servant, and she should be rewarded.

He stared into her deep blue eyes, and said, "I love you."

He could actually see her irises flaring at those words, watch her skin flush and ears go red.

He coaxed her, "I love you, say it."

"I love you," she repeated, her voice tiny with sincerity.

"Beyond all others."

"Beyond all others."

He pressed the edge of the dagger to her lips, not too hard, but hard enough to cut if she didn't remain perfectly still. "Beyond life itself."

Slowly, lingeringly, she repeated the words. "Beyond life itself." And when he moved the blade from her mouth, a bright bead of blood rose on her lower lip. Oh, and he could imagine how breathless with heat she would be if he was to lean forward and kiss that blood – but he restrained himself.

He could feel her devotion, burning even brighter inside her. This little ritual had been the right choice, the right reward, he could see it. She was his now more than ever.

Carefully, neatly, he slid the dagger back into its bundle. "All seven are here?"

She replied, "All seven, Mr. Thorn." She touched her tongue to the blood on her lower lip, tasting it.

"Good." He pulled the bundle's strap off her shoulder and put the daggers down on the side table. "You have done me and my Father an invaluable service, Miss White. Thank you."

"It was my pleasure." A tiny sliver of a lie there; she hadn't enjoyed seeing the intruder maimed. But he let it slide. If it ever showed signs of bothering her, he could always tell her what the man had been planning for her in his mind.

"So. What do you think I should do with these?"

She looked down at the bundle of daggers with a gleam of hatred in the back of her eye. "I've got a hacksaw in my car."

He gaped at her for an instant, unable to quite grasp what she had said. "These are priceless historical artifacts!"

"Priceless, dangerous historical artifacts. A hacksaw-"

"No." He was not going to surrender these blades, not even to destroy them. In fact, it would amuse him to display them at some point in the future. Rebuild the Thorn Museum in Chicago, and make these the centerpiece. Let his enemies look on them and feel their impotence.

She dipped her head in thought, then looked back up. "You can't put them in any of the safes here, even ones that aren't opened now; you have to assume they've all been compromised. If you want them accessible, I'd drop them in a box, an old box, and hide them in the attic." She and Neff had had a merry time rooting around up there finding a hat for Damien to wear for his trip to see the McBatts. You could hide a hundred daggers among the detritus of three generations of Thorns.

She went on. "And if you want them here and don't care if they are accessible, wrap them in plastic and put them into one of those big vases," she pointed to one, standing shoulder-high in the entrance hall, "and then fill the bottom with plaster. Or concrete, even."

He nodded in approval. He'd thought of both of those ideas, but it was perfectly fine to ask for another opinion. There was always the chance that she would have come up with something new.

He had another question for her, and he wanted a serious answer. "I would like to know what they threatened you with, that they thought would make you come here and kill me."

She paled. "They," she swallowed, "I'm, or rather my whole group is, working on self-improving computer intelligences. Planning their risk/reward cycles, learning how to teach them how to learn, creating control protocols, it's very complex work. And the programs we've made – they change themselves thousands of times faster than we could change their code by hand. They're unique, irreplaceable. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of years of machine learning iterated into our systems, and they – said that they would shut them off. Erase them. Destroy my, our work."

"That's all?" He arched one eyebrow.

She glared back at him for an instant, before visibly pulling back and calming herself. "Our projections suggest that whoever creates the first general purpose artificial intelligence that has the capacity to self-modify its mind while maintaining integrity – to turn itself into a superintelligence – could be in a position to take over this entire planet in days, if not hours. Think of how embedded computers are into the world today – and imagine one mind ruling everything. Imagine an artificial intelligence so powerful that it can determine new basic rules of physics and apply them to reality. A single point of control –a singleton – and we could build it. It could be our decisions, our lessons, our code, that create it."

"You realize that if you succeed, you will be creating this computer mind to serve me." His tone was very calm.

"Yes, Mr. Thorn." And there was in the face and her voice and her mind and her heart not the slightest hint of deception.

* * *

"As your attorney, Mr. Thorn, I have to advise against this in the strongest possible terms," Mrs. Fitzpatrick said over the phone.

Damien was listening politely enough, but he was also going over his suit with hands and eyes in front of the mirror by the door. Outside, a rented black car was waiting, headlights bouncing off the slightly too-mossy statues in the garden.

"Damien, this is not a thing that you need to do." Captain Neff was as earnest as he could be, and under normal circumstances Damien would have stopped and listened. But having this meeting now didn't just feel like a good idea, it felt right, it felt like a necessity.

And Damien was used to following his feelings.

"Mrs. Fitzpatrick, I appreciate your advice. I realize that this could be seen as sending the wrong message-"

"It can be seen as hopelessly muddling any legal suit we press against Thorn Industries. They'll be able to say that of course you consented to their treatment of you, because if you'd felt threatened or abused you wouldn't agree to meet with them. It-"

He cut her off. "I want to give them a chance to explain themselves, in private. Just us. Surely you don't think they would stoop to physical violence."

Physical violence would do them no good at all. Not without the daggers, which were currently nestling in one of Robert Thorn's hatboxes, and buried deep in a stack of identical hatboxes in the icy, dusty attic. He hadn't even told Neff that they were here, although he supposed he would eventually. For the moment, it felt safer for no one to know where those weapons were – no one but him.

He ended the call with his protesting attorney. "Daniel," he put his hand on the other's shoulder, smiled into his eyes, "I will be all right. Trust me." And with that, he went out to his car.

Chicago at night was still beautiful, the light of the skyscrapers reflecting off the river. He was going to Thorn Tower, and the sight of it was not beautiful to him. Oh, the location was choice, right on Michigan Avenue, an impressive forty-nine stories. And he appreciated the sharply slanted tip of the skyscraper, divided as though into two ears – or horns.

It was the Thorn company logo, printed giant across that slanted surface, that displeased him. Not only was the logo split in half by the building's design, it had been updated, or rather mutilated, at some time in the nineties. It was just hideous now; distorted, a foolish slogan appended to it, little green curlicues – atrocious design. He was definitely going to change that. Maybe go back to the original classic logo: just the globe, and THORN across it. One world. One Thorn.

There were people waiting at the doors to the lobby, holding cameras and microphones. Their voices swelled into a babble when he stepped out of the car at the curb. But building security was there as well, and they held the men and women back as Damien strode up the steps and inside. He hadn't asked the car to wait, because he didn't know if he would be here five minutes or eight hours. He had no idea of what would be waiting for him in the executive conference room.

His pace quickened. He couldn't wait.


	12. Anointed in Tears

_(A/N: To see the real-life version of Thorn Tower, check out the Crain Communications Building, 150 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago IL)_

* * *

The table in the executive conference room in Thorn Tower was like a great steel blade pointed out into the darkened cityscape. It was long and narrow and it had twenty-one chairs around it. Seventeen of those chairs had people in them, and anxious eyes turned again and again to the empty one at the head of the table.

Where was Paul Buher? He was the acting CEO, he was the man in charge, he had to be here. He was the one responsible for … everything. How could he not be here?

George Grant and Jorge Anders were working over a presentation on a laptop, updating this graph and that number, and sweating bullets all the while. They were certain that if only they could show Mr. Thorn how much money was really controlled by the company, how many layers of accreted secrecy were protecting that money, he would let them do as they wished. After all, look how well they had already done!

Doctor Allan Larson was looking at the calendar on his smartphone, frozen-faced. He had been given his shares in exchange for reporting that Damien Thorn was in an irreversible brain-dead state, he had said that every year for decades, and now he could feel the glares burning against his skin. His lies were out for all to see. He had only come because of threats of what would happen if he didn't.

The others in the room, shareholders and board members alike, fidgeted and chattered, or looked at their tablets, or talked on their phones to their lawyers or their travel agents or their families. Some of them looked terrified to tears, and some of them looked too numb to react. There had been multiple blows to the company over the last two weeks, and the disasters just kept coming.

Alexander Thorn, dead. Damien Thorn, awake and alive and out in the world. Employee absenteeism among those who knew what those two facts meant had exploded, as people took their accumulated vacation time, went to visit abruptly ill relatives, or just stayed home. It was bleakly obvious that they were going to wait to see who won, and then give their loyalty to the winning side.

The great clock over the doors stood at one minute to nine. Grant darted to the switchplate and lowered the lights to test the projector for his presentation. People gasped, someone almost let out a scream – and then nervous laughter, as they realized what had happened.

"Jesus, what's gotten into all of you?" wondered Suzanne Frechette aloud from the foot of the table. She was blonde and sleek in black mink, recent inheritor of her late husband's shares, and she had no idea why everyone was so upset. "Who do you think this guy is, anyway?"

There was a moment of dead silence as everyone looked at her and realized that no one had told her, that she actually did not know, what Power was coming up in the elevator right now, and pacing towards them.

The doors under the clock opened, and the light outside flooded in to outline a man, one hand on each door. His shadow streamed out to cover the table and their frightened faces. They could not see his face, but his head was crowned with white hair, and even in the gloom his eyes had a deep gleam to them.

"Good evening," the man said warmly. Some of them knew that voice, and they cringed. It was him, the one they had thought was helpless and lost. He did not need to introduce himself.

The doors swung shut, and Grant quickly turned on the lights, terrified of being trapped in a dark room with _him_ and not being able to see where he was. Damien Thorn was here, in an impeccable suit, bearded and smiling, large as life and as terrifying as ever, or more so. His presence lit up the room, but that light had a tinge of hellfire in it.

"And you must be Mrs. Frechette. How do you do," he practically purred as he took her hand. You could almost see the stars lighting up in her eyes, along with the dollar signs. Here she was, a widow, and here he was – rich, handsome, charming, single…

Damien worked his way down the table, shaking hands with everyone and calling them by name – how convenient was the Internet for looking up people's photos! Previously he would have had to send an assistant to fetch newspaper articles. But now he could instantly recognize Mr. Grant, Mr. King, Mr. Abel, Mr. Lethem, Mr. Anders, and so on. Most of them were too young to have served under him –Buher's lickspittle – but the ones he did know got exactly the same greeting as the rest. He stared a little longer into the eyes of Doctor Larson, memorizing the fear on his face: a face he was fairly certain he had never seen before in the flesh.

After working his way to the head of the table, Damien looked at the empty chair with an expression of benign puzzlement. "Paul appears to be late. Has anyone heard when he is going to arrive?"

He raked the attendees with a cool gaze, and heads were shaken. No one had heard from Paul since the seventh.

"Well, perhaps he's on the phone." The phone was a triangular grilled thing that looked nothing like the phones he was used to, but he had seen one of these in the McBatts office. And it had a keypad, and a lit button that looked like a phone handset. "Is anyone there?" he said to it.

The voice that answered was old and wavering. "Mister Thorn, this is Jeffrey Spatt. When I received your email I had a heart attack."

"Oh really?" Damien asked neutrally.

"Really. I'm calling from the hospital." His breathing was labored, and he spoke slowly but clearly. "I want to say that I am personally delighted to have you back. That I am absolutely committed to your leadership and hope to return to work soon." His voice faded for a moment, and they could hear a woman asking for the phone. A nurse, probably. Then his voice came back, faster and louder. "And if I don't recover, my daughter Fiona is my heir and will keep good watch over my shares."

Watch, that was the magic word of course. The signal of where his allegiance lay. Damien watched jaws clench around the table as Spatt revealed his true loyalties. Too much anger, not enough submission. He wondered how many people he was going to be able to salvage from this nest of vipers.

"Get better, Mister Spatt. I look forward to working with you in the future." A beep, but the speakerphone remained lit up. Someone was still there, still listening. Whoever could it be? He could guess.

There was a sound from the speakerphone. A very faint sound. A sob. Damien smiled, the smile of the fox when the rabbit is helpless under its paws.

"Paul. Come here, now." A simple command, but the weight of it lay against the skin of everyone present for an instant, and then it was gone.

* * *

That command had been aimed at one person, who was now sitting terribly still in his well-padded leather chair. Paul Buher was actually less than twenty miles away from Thorn Tower as the crow flies. He had chosen his hiding place with great care, because it gave him an almost infinite number of escape routes.

But all of those routes were gone now. There was the one command, burning into his mind, moving his hands and feet without his volition. Come here, now. And he would.

He turned off his cellphone and carelessly tossed it into the seat beside him. He reached for the hook and took up the heavy radio headset, and put it on, and flipped a switch.

He called the control tower, and asked to be put into rotation for takeoff. Air traffic was light, and he was slotted to hit Runway 9/N within the next fifteen minutes. He warmed up the engines, hit another switch to open the private hanger doors, and taxied the nine-seater executive Beechjet out into the cold night air.

He was going to Damien.

* * *

Damien had not taken the seat at the head of the table; instead he was looking out the great glass window at the lights of the city.

"All of this burned in the great Chicago fire of 1871, you know," he said in a conversational tone that somehow managed to carry to every corner of the room, even with his back turned. "The fire burned for three days. The smoke and flames filled the horizon. Hundreds dead, hundreds of thousands homeless. And they started to plan to rebuild before the ashes were cool. Donations of lumber, food, supplies poured in from across the nation. The people who had seen their city burn drove themselves to recreate what was lost, and to make it bigger, better, grander than it had ever been."

"My grandfather founded Thorn Industries in 1899. My uncle expanded it, turned it into an international force. I transformed it into a multinational conglomerate with hands out to help anyone who needed employment, opportunity, or charity.

"For thirty-three years, while I was incapacitated, Paul Buher ran this company as he saw fit."

He turned and gave them his face, set in an expression of regret and sadness. Of deepest personal disappointment. "And when I finally recovered, I found that everything I had created had burned. The great tree of commerce I'd grown was destroyed, down to the roots, and those roots were clinging to a false life underground. A company in the shadows, siphoning away money and creating – nothing."

His voice had dropped at those last words, and people leaned forward to hear; when he paused, they replied in a blur of voices, one talking over the other. Excuses, denials, blame shifting… He waited, watching them, until they ran out of words.

"But I am here. I am the majority shareholder of this company. It has been thirty three years, and the world had changed and I have not. But I can change. I can learn. And I am going to recreate what has been lost. I am laying my plans to rebuild, and I will make Thorn the largest, and the greatest, company on this planet."

"Mister Thorn." That was Matthew King, stolid and square with a grown man's face that had never lost the look of a petulant baby. "What you are suggesting is – well, it may be legal, but it certainly isn't right. Things have changed more than you can possibly imagine. If you just take over, you will destroy this company. You need the help of people like us, people who know how business is done these days. You can't do everything by yourself!"

Damien looked at King, at all of them, with the air of a patient teacher. "Alexander of Macedon ruled the known world when he was thirty. One man can be that powerful. But Alexander is dead, and I am alive." An unsubtle reminder that his son was no more.

He continued, "I realize that the world has changed. I appreciate that you have thrived and prospered, in your own way, in this new world. I have studied your actions – all of them – and you have succeeded at some scattered, disconnected goals. But you had no grand strategy, no plan to unify your actions. I do. You had no compass to guide you. I do."

He had a destiny, one that would not be denied; certainly not by little traitors like these.

"I see that Thorn has abandoned many of its charitable works, many of our joint ventures with Third World countries. With the money we spend advertising for bloated Americans to force more food into themselves, we could feed every starving person on the planet – but oh, there's no profit in that!" His words stung. "We could save the world, we could create a new one where everyone is fed, is housed, is cared for – but you threw it away for money."

Grant, mustache twitching with nerves, half-raised his hand and said in a rush, "Mister Thorn, I've put together a presentation, myself and Mister Anders here," Anders winced at the mention of his name, eyes too wide, "to show you how much money we are talking about. You can't even conceive of the profit-"

Damien snapped around the side of the table, moving with long strides of his long legs. He was at Grant's shoulder in an instant, fingers tapping on the keys of the laptop in front of him. The familiar colored slides, the ones that Fallyn had shown him, flashed over the screen. Three taps, five taps, and then he straightened.

"I have seen this already. All of this. I was not impressed." He returned to his place at the head of the table a little more slowly, letting people lean and whisper to each other: how did he know? Who told him? It must be a shareholder, was it Spatt? Was it someone here? Who-

Damien broke through their whispering, and now his words were needles dipped in acid. "I am not interested in coffers full of money that is never spent. I am not a dragon sitting on a hoard of gold. I want to do, to create, to move the world! Money is energy waiting to be unleashed, it is not numbers to sit on a ledger and rot. And it is not empty power that is used only to make and protect more useless money."

He turned back to the window and stared into the blackness. "I left you the keys to a kingdom, and you sold them for the value of the base metal. And that is what grieves me the most."

* * *

He was a bird, soaring through the darkness, the lights of Chicago lying below him like an endless field of jewels. But there was only one jewel he wanted, one jewel that called to him. He knew where it was, because he knew the city. It was impossible to miss: the building with the top shaped like a cloven hoof. That was the box that held the jewel beyond price.

The radio was making irritating noises, so he turned it off. He turned off his beacon and navigation lights as well. A shadow among shadows, he rose higher, higher, in a wide spiral over the darkened waters of the great lake. He thought he could feel the wind whispering to him, telling him that everything was going to be all right.

When he was high enough, he would turn off the engines and go sliding down, down and down. The beautiful one, the Son of the Morning Star, he was waiting for him. Paul would go to him and be forgiven, plunge into those strong arms and accept his embrace, so long as he flew most secret, most fast, most silent.

"Damien," he whispered, listening to the wind whipping against the plane. "I'm coming."

* * *

He had not pleaded; he had not lowered himself; and he had not used anything more than his words. Damien had simply told these people that he was going to be in charge now, and that it would be in their best interests if they agreed. He offered them a chance to rise with him, to see the company and the world reborn under his leadership.

He had known of course that he could simply overwhelm their will with his own, as he had done to that pathetic Javier just a few hours ago; but he wanted them to choose his path. He wanted them to see their own errors, and give them up.

Instead they rejected him. They renounced his plans, they balked at his ambition, they savaged his perfectly reasonable agenda point by point, they questioned his judgment and his sanity, they threatened lawsuits and obstruction and outright sabotage, they tied themselves into knots evading the question of the legitimacy of his claim, and in their minds there was nothing but the thought of money, money, money.

They were chained slaves, and the chains were strings of invisible numbers, electronic money in hidden accounts. And they had put those chains on themselves, and made them heavier and thicker every year. And they proposed to fight with all their strength against the person who promised to turn their chains into crowns, and lead them to paradise on earth.

Mr. Boorman, aptly named, had even made some smug insinuations about "certain events in the past" and hinted that it would be very hard for people to accept him, if they knew what he'd done. And what he was.

Damien hadn't dignified that with a response. He had noted how confused Mrs. Frechette seemed at those words, and deciphered at a glance that no one had told her his true nature. Incompetents, from the top down. It was a measure of how damaged he'd been, how crippled, that they had managed to hold him restrained.

He gritted his teeth and kept going. And finally he just stated flat-out: who will help me? Who will join with me to turn Thorn into something to be proud of, something the whole world will look up to?

Every one of them looked aside, and then one looked back, and rose to his feet. It was not who he expected.

Doctor Larson was white as a sheet, but he looked at Damien and stuttered his assent. Damien looked into him and saw lies, lies boiling within lies. He was not loyal to Damien, but he was afraid he would be killed if he did not escape. Despite his terror at what Buher could do, he believed that this defection would let him survive.

Of course his loyalty would last only until he was away from this place. He was planning on fleeing tonight, but that was all right. Damien would offer him a lift home to give them time to discuss matters, and lay his will upon him during the drive. Once the doctor was under his control, his testimony in court would be extremely useful.

Damien was so lost in the pleasure of this hypothetical future that he almost missed Mr. King's hand sliding under his jacket. But his other senses suddenly came alive, warning him of danger, that this foolish man actually had a gun and was thinking of drawing it in his presence-

There was a dry snapping sound, and King flinched, hand clutching something against his side. Mrs. Frechette was staring, confused; everyone else was staring in some mix of contempt, disgust and ... admiration?

Enough! He had the measure of these cowards, these dogs unfit to lick his feet. He saw no need to goad them into open combat; that would be just too pathetic. Instead he moved smoothly around the table, scooping up Doctor Larson and bringing him along with a hand on his shoulder. He reached the double doors, held them open so Larson could leave, and then held them open another moment.

Last chance.

Mrs. Frechette threw herself to her feet and dashed out the doors. Damien smiled, and that smile was the last they saw of him as the doors closed.

King removed his hand from under his coat; his automatic still sat in its holster. He had felt the shudder as a bullet misfired without him even touching the trigger, and he was terrified of what might happen if he tried to clear it.

"Damn it!" he cursed, pounding the table with his fist, and then pounding again and again, as though that would do any good. While he had his little tantrum, the rest watched in dismay or pulled out their phones and started calling for reinforcements. Allies. Help.

They were all very much too late, of course.

* * *

Damien was leaving, fast. He didn't know why, but he had a feeling that this was the right thing to do. This was not a retreat from an enemy, he could tell. In the back of his mind was the image of something coming closer. There was still time, but he should leave, leave with those he was going to save.

Save from what? He did not know. But he walked with fast aggrieved strides, and Doctor Larson and Mrs. Frechette had to trot to keep up.

When he reached the front doors of Thorn Tower, he saw a waiting mass of people. Handheld lights came on as soon as his face appeared, and voices and microphones were raised. He'd thought that this late in the evening the press would have moved on, but apparently not. They were in a fever pitch, and now that they had him trapped they weren't going to let him free without some answers.

He could of course call for his car, have security force them back, but the showman in him tingled. There was a park right across the way, on the other side of Michigan Avenue. He could see a fountain, encircled by a half-circle of pillars. Why not lead the reporters over there, and address them all at once? It would make for a small but pleasant spectacle. A little dress rehearsal for the many speeches to come.

So he did. He stepped outside, with his two followers tight on his heels, and marched confidently across the avenue, gesturing for the crowd to follow him. They did, trailing behind him like a great cloak.

He entered the park and stepped onto the fountain's rim to see them all better, and to be seen; he had faced down along the length of the park, to encourage his followers to gather there and not on the sidewalk. Thorn Tower loomed at his right hand. The reporters and curious onlookers gathered in a half-circle in front of him, and a man with a camera fell to one knee to get a low-angle picture of him.

He raised his hands in a welcoming gesture. "Ladies and gentlemen, I am Damien Thorn."

The world lit up, lightning-bright, every face below him transforming from a dim blur to sharp, stark, brilliant detail. Their eyes rolled up in unison to the light, as hammering thunder pounded on all their heads.

He looked over his shoulder and up, and saw: the great burning cloud engulfing the top of Thorn Tower, the spray of molten metal and flaming liquid leaping out into the night sky, the veil of glitter descending that was thousands of pounds of shattered glass-

He roared RUN! And everyone ran. Like frightened rabbits they exploded away from the fountain and the descending destruction. Damien was right behind them, grabbing a woman who fell and hauling her to her feet in one move, yelling that everyone should keep running.

The trees were thrashing in the sudden hurricane of wind and heat, and the glass was starting to hit; he heard the crash-tinkle of it landing all around him, and screams. Heavier thudding sounds, of other debris. People were still running, cars were stopping farther up the avenue, skidding to a halt – have to get them to move, the fire trucks would need to get through -

He saw Doctor Larson ahead of him; the fool had stopped, stopped and turned and was gaping up at the explosion – and then he wasn't there. He was blotted out by a great mass of smoking metal shrapnel, which landed on him from out of the sky as neatly and precisely as a dart hitting its mark. Damien hadn't even had time to swerve and try to get the man moving. And now there was no need. He just ran past the bloodied mass of metal and flesh, shouting to keep anyone else from stopping.

No testimony from Doctor Larson would be forthcoming, it seemed. Another stink was added to the furious smell of burning fuel and flaming insulation and red-hot steel: the reek of overcooked pork.

A block down the park, people started to slow and turn, staring up at the destruction. Damien came up to them, breathing deeply. Behind him were the first of the people escaping from Thorn Tower itself, many of them bloodied about hands and knees from skidding and falling on the slippery layers of broken glass that covered the ground. People were clutching each other, or filming the blaze forty stories above the street with their phones. Mrs. Frechette was crying, one hand to the side of her face; he pulled the hand away and pressed his own scarf to the slight wound on her forehead. A man came running up in blue surgical gear, and he handed the crying woman over to him. He could see the flickering lights of ambulances coming in both directions, far down the canyon of the avenue.

He raised his hands, and eyes turned to him; even in the center of chaos, his presence compelled them to pay attention. "Everyone who was working in Thorn Tower tonight! Please talk to each other and make certain that everyone got out of the building!"

Immediately the crowd started to churn and clot, as people looked around and found their co-workers, and went to them, and asked: Sarah was out sick, so was Jesse, did Mike come in? What about Roy, he'd said he was going on vacation but then said he needed the hours, did he come in? Was he there? Was he still in there? And every clot of Thorn workers was surrounded by gawkers, passerby, shouting reporters. People yelled, or called their families, or sat and rocked, or stared mute at the firelight far over their heads. Cars were halted all up and down the avenue, as people pulled over to see the destruction.

Damien was gazing up at the flames. He would feel tears running down his face, and his heart was tremulous with joy. How amazing, how inspiring, to behold his Father's power writ large in the world! His enemies had lined themselves up before him and they had fallen to his just wrath. Even Paul Buher; somehow he knew that it had been him, his plane, his crash, him the bearer and the receiver of the fiery death that he so richly deserved.

He didn't bother to wipe away those tears. Those were tears shed in reverence to his Father. They were tears of pride.

* * *

The photojournalist who had knelt to get the dramatic shot of Damien Thorn silhouetted against the building, and had gotten more than he ever dreamed of, had his photos watermarked, tagged and posted within fifteen minutes, using the laptop in his car. The sirens were still wailing, the flames still roaring hot in the night when the world saw them.

A dignified man with gray hair and beard, mouth open as though speaking; behind and above him an explosion was cleaving the top of a building in two. The shadow of an executive jet's tailfin could be seen in the fireball, which had been flattened sideways and up as it was compressed between the shattering floors of the skyscraper.

The explosion looked like a burning crown, hovering over the head of Damien Thorn.

There was another photo of Damien, against a blurred background of people and smoke: his face was set in an expression of ecstatic horror, and firelight shone off his hair and glittered in his eyes and on the tears running down his face.

He posted other photos of course. People running with falling glass streaking around them. The top of Thorn Tower engulfed in flames. Reflections of those flames dancing over the skyscrapers of Chicago. A great slab of ragged metal driven into a green grassy lawn, with a sooty streak running out from it that was a charred human arm. There were many great photos, but those first two were the ones that went around the world in minutes.

In another time, the one who had taken those spectacular images of the disaster would almost certainly been in the running for a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography. Unfortunately, by the time award season rolled around, there were other things on the world's mind.

* * *

When Damien arrived home (security had had to physically block cars from following him with their own vehicles), he found Neff waiting at the front door, eyes staring and sick. Of course, he would have been watching the news, studying it for signs.

Damien went to him, put his hands on his shoulders. "My enemies are burnt to ashes before me."

Neff's voice was husky. "And the smoke of their burning was very sweet."

Sweet indeed.

* * *

[The story continues at AO3 - please see my author profile for details.]


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